Next Release Notes

Skyward Collapse 1.0-2.0 Period Round Up

The 1.0-2.0 Period for Skyward Collapse spanned from May 24 through Aug. 26th. 549 distinct changes were made as part of 29 different releases over the course of 95 days. This comes to nearly 6 changes per day.

78 Players are thanked in this series (50 more than in the beta period). Some of the most common names this time around are:

Misery 85

nas1m 49

Valtiel 21

Pepisolo 15

Mick 13

Winge 10

vehementi 7

FooBarTheLittle 6

Bluddy 5

Billick 4

DakaSha 4

solosol 4

yllamana 4

zharmad 4

blastpop 3

boho 3

CC80 3

Ipkins 3

LaughingThesaurus 3

mrhanman 3

restingsound 3

Warpstorm 3

Official 2.0

(Released August 26, 2013)

The in-game credits have been updated to thank all players who made at least one suggestion or bug report that was accepted during the 1.0 to 2.0 period.

The "What's New" link has been updated to link to a new post-2.0 page.

The costs of the Japanese mythological god-related units is now vastly lower than it was before, and does not vary by difficulty level (just like tokens work).

Thanks to nas1m and Misery for suggesting.

The cost of Ryu has been reduced from 8 jewelry (aka 24 diamond and 32 iron) to just 50 iron.

Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

Several typo fixes:

Fixed a typo in the Kodama tooltip.

Fixed a typo in the Jubokko tooltip.

The Japanese god tooltips were still claiming that town centers spawned monsters.

Thanks to nas1m and Pepisolo for reporting.

Fixed a bug where the luminith tower and ark were showing as disabled for placement even if you had the resources and could actually place them.

This didn't affect functionality, it just was confusing.

Thanks to Pepisolo for reporting

Fixed an issue that has apparently existed for as long as building upgrades have existed:

The actual resource amounts produced by the first upgrade level were doubling the base production of the resource producer, making them way overpowered. Then the remaining upgrades beyond the first proceeded at the regular scale.

The actual upgrade tooltips were showing what the values _should_ have been but were not. But these values were, in actual practice, far too low to be useful these days.

Fixed the bug with the overpowered-in-practice first level of upgrade, and then tweaked the upgrade progression so that it is useful and flows naturally from one level to the next.

Fixed a bug in the prior version where Frailty was affecting buildings, and was still not affecting units quite right.

Thanks to Tormentoso for reporting.

In order to avoid confusion: instead of saying "Can be used X times" on pickup-style tokens, the game now says "Placed tokens can be picked up X times."

Thanks to Valtiel for reporting.

Fixed a bug where ally camps were counting as towns for the purposes of the red and blue town counters in the top bar.

Thanks to death2cupbots and Valtiel for reporting.

Previously it was possible to send your AP negative by using multi-AP actions of certain sorts, specifically with smiting buildings. That was not supposed to be possible, but now it at least caps it at 0 AP in case it does happen.

Thanks to Pepisolo for reporting.

Town Specialization, which was on difficulties Hard and up, has been removed; everything related to that now works like it used to on Normal and down.

The reasons for this were many:

This was a source of constant confusion with many players.

The upgrade model does a lot of this in a more interesting fashion, with less confusion. Obviously without specialization-per-town, but still.

Players were able to use this to get way way too many resources with Large Towns in particular.

Thanks to Misery and nas1m for helping to inspire this.

Previously, Independent units could still attack bandit keeps and monster caves, even though they could not hurt the bandits themselves. Fixed.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

"Cannot Be Attacked From Range" now shows up as a proper unit ability in green, like other unit abilities. This was causing some confusion with it not being there, as well as not being explained at all on some units, like Chimera.

Thanks to nas1m and Valtiel for reporting.

The health and attack power on Dark Elves has been increased 10x, making them truly terrifying on higher upgrade levels in particular.

Thanks to Valtiel for reporting and inciting this madness.

Fixed a bug where previously the Daeva were insta-killing all humans, not just those lower-level than themselves.

Thanks to Valtiel for reporting.

Fixed an issue where when town specialization was turned off, resource producers would report their production as half what it should have been in their tooltips before they were placed.

Thanks to nas1m, Oralordos, and Valtiel for reporting.

Norse Huscarls now have a strong defensive bonus against cavalry instead of siege, thus differentiating them from Marauders a lot more. And giving the Norse an anti-cav unit, which they did not have before.

Thanks to Valtiel for suggesting.

Corrected the hippo-toxote description to not indicate that all of them start as bandits, since that's not quite true.

Thanks to Valtiel for reporting.

When you switch into a mode like Bless or town center placement, the regularly selected filters temporarily don't show their darkening effects. They were clashing with the colorization from those particular placement modes.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Fixed a super longstanding bug where if you were low on a resource, buildings that produce units could still produce lots of that unit so long as they had enough to produce one. This has been leading to at least somewhat inflated armies since the dawn of this game, honestly.

Thanks to Winge, nas1m and Valtiel for reporting.

Fixed a bug where the colorization on individual existing land tiles was not working properly in terms of what range it used during town center placement (so some things would show as available when really they should have been red).

Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Random Map Types And Factions

Added a new Random Map option in the setup window, which chooses one of the other map types at random.

Thanks to nas1m and Misery for suggesting.

Added the ability to choose random factions for red and blue. Duplicates ARE allowed, as those are actually pretty interesting scenarios that a lot of players overlook.

Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

Expansion-Specific Fixes And Tweaks

The costs and points of many of the god-related mythos were looked at and adjusted. Any further feedback on this area is appreciated.

Thanks largely to Misery for pointing out the need for this.

Previously, it was possibly to launch the Hamlet Idyll game mode without having the expansion (though the mode would not function).

Thanks to Valtiel for reporting.

Fixed the description on Enlarge Town giving the correct number of plots but the wrong dimensions.

Thanks to Valtiel for reporting.

Japanese gods no longer automatically spawn their mythological creatures from town centers.

Thanks to Misery, nas1m, and Valtiel for inspiring this change.

Japanese Sappers were missing the mountain crosser ability. Fixed.

Thanks to Valtiel for reporting.

Japanese God-Related Mythological Creature Changes

A reworking of many of the god-related mythological creature bonuses has been undertaken.

Thanks to Misery, nas1m, and Valtiel for suggesting.

The Hihi has had its ability adjusted as follows:

A baboon monster that is invincible while in bamboo forests. Transfers this attribute to any enemies that it attacks, while wiping out all the other bonuses the unit may have. Worth 3x the normal number of points on death.

The Gagoze has had its ability adjusted as follows:

A lazy priest-servant turned demon-ghost who likes to kill children. No Japanese barracks, archery range, or siege workshop will produce units while he lives. Worth 2x the normal number of points on death.

The Baku has had its ability adjusted as follows:

Devours dreams and nightmares. The turn after he is placed, the current and next woes will be replaced with completely new woes. Then, each turn a single random non-god unit with bonuses (enemy or allied) within range of 3 will have all its bonuses wiped out. In place of those bonuses, a single Nightmare bonus will be applied to that unit: this makes them invulnerable to attack, but also inverts their auto-heal. Worth 3x the normal number of points on death.

The Kawauso has had its ability adjusted as follows:

River otters with a very low speed and attack. While at least one of these otters are on the map, no units have the water-crosser ability (though those with flying can still cross water). Worth 2x the normal number of points on death.

The Hou-ou has had its ability adjusted as follows:

The arrival of these Phoenix-like birds mark the birth of a virtuous ruler. The turn after they are placed, a random human unit from any faction on the map when they are gets a "strong leader" bonus, which gives that human the ability to grant, per turn, any one allied human unit within 5 of them a permanent 15x attack boost. Worth 8x the normal number of points on death.

The Tanuki has had its ability adjusted as follows:

A raccoon-dog that is excellent at disguising itself to make people look stupid. Any enemy mythological creatures that come within range 2 of it get struck with vanity. Worth 2x the normal number of points on death.

The Kodama has had its ability adjusted as follows:

Spirits that normally live in certain trees in the inner reaches of mountains. Killing a Kodama via direct attack brings misfortune in the form of the loss of the attacking unit losing all bonuses it may have. Worth 6x the normal number of points on death.

The Zorigami has had its ability adjusted as follows:

Immune to ranged attack. Does no damage. Wanders at random at speed 1. All human units from any faction that come within range 2 of it get their AP permanently quadrupled AND their score-on-death worth quadrupled. Worth 4x the normal number of points on death.

Further Hamlet Refinements

The high-scoring hamlet building slots have had their order reversed, so that the high-scoring items are lower in the list.

This was a brilliant suggestion that allows more of the field to be relevant, and rewards more patience.

Thanks to Valtiel for suggesting.

The Mayor's House is still very rare, but it is now 5x more common.

Thanks to Misery and Valtiel for suggesting.

Banks no longer spawn a banker, as we needed his graphic for something else.

When you place any hamlet building, a builder now appears on that tile for a little while, blocking you from replacing it. Suddenly hamlets feel much more crowded...

Thanks to Misery and nas1m for inspiring this change.

Previously, all difficulty levels for Hamlet Idyll mode had 20 ruin plots on which to place land.

Now this varies by difficulty as follows:

Easy: 22

Normal: 20

Hard: 18

Expert: 16

Insane: 14

Torment: 10

The idea here is that this makes placement increasingly constrained such that the choices are more meaningful and difficult. If these numbers turn out to be too small, we can of course adjust them. But Torment is meant to be... well, to live up to its name!

Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

You can now continue to see what your generated-culture would be from placing a hamlet building on a tile that has a unit or token on it; you can't place on these tiles still, but now you can see what you are missing out on. The idea here is that this helps teach longer-term planning and makes the effects of the civilians more implicitly clear.

Fixed an issue with units spawning with different health values than 1 health when frailty was active; this was due to their various bonuses pumping up their health above what was originally set to 1 health.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Added a new setting to the Extras tab in the settings menu: Pan View With Projectiles During Playback

With this on, your view will follow the progress of any fired projectiles during playback, rather than staying focused on the firing unit.

Thanks to blastpop and nas1m for suggesting.

Fixed an issue where in the last couple of versions since the town placement radius was extended, the "theoretical tiles" where a town center could be placed beyond the existing land on the continent were showing up as green when they should have been red in some cases.

Thanks to Pepisolo for reporting.

Put in a fix to prevent town center placement mode and military outpost placement mode and luminith tower/ark placement mode from being very laggy on larger maps.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Expansion-Specific Fixes And Tweaks

The action point cost to place buildings in hamlet idyll mode has been removed, as there was no point to it.

Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

Nine Expansion-Specific Woes

Black Mist

A dark mist sweeps across the land, weakening all true heroes. Every turn, all non-god units have all of their permanent bonuses wiped out (aka, this does not affect temporary bonuses received from gods, global tokens, proximity to certain units, etc).

Deep Blight

A sickness grows in the very earth itself. Bursting out of every wheat field comes strange, alien-looking plants in a terrible blight. Smite these evil weeds before they take over the rest of your towns!

Rapid Shoots

Tendrils and shoots of bamboo rapidly take hold in every regular forest, quickly consuming them and turning them into bamboo forests.

Disrepair

A general malaise strikes your military fortifications. All defensive towers and military outposts collapse into marshland.

Power Of The Mountain

A strange and terrifying power comes over all men, beasts, and gods alike. None may harm another, and all gain great strength... thus destruction must rain down upon the towns themselves.

Dorotabo Apocalypse (catastrophic)

Dozens of zombies are poking their heads up out of the ground everywhere... but fortunately get stuck with just their torsos sticking out of the ground. Unfortunately, more appear every turn until you kill the last of them!

Hidoi Yami (catastrophic)

Literally "terrible darkness," a great plague of monsters from Japan rise up to fight in the world of men. Numerous of Japan's 24 god-related creatures will appear as bandits.

Izanagi's Call

The god Izanagi, father of many of the Japanese gods, makes a clarion call into the void. An additional greater god appears for each of the factions, out of their proper mythology.

Kaminoikari

The wrath of the gods strike Luminith! An evil twin of all of the gods on the map immediately appears for the bandit faction! These evil twins are restless and active, striking out at the enemies of banditry.

Japanese God-Related Creatures From Town Centers

Japanese god-related creatures now spawn on Japanese town centers every turn—so once the Japanese gods come out, either you want to kill the god (difficult) or make sure that the other faction is tough enough to withstand them. Or just build very few Japanese towns (another advantage of Large Towns).

Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

Further Hamlet Refinements

Hamlet Idyll mode now gives you 5 more ruins tiles to spread out into, as you're going to need them now.

Three civilians are now placed via each tile that would normally place civilians, instead of just one. This makes those tiles a lot more challenging to deal with.

The base bonuses and penalties for hamlet buildings have been scaled very differently now from what they were—much higher in most cases, making placement adjacencies more severe at all times.

The multiplier from placing from higher slots in the hamlet queue has been toned down quite a bit; the multiplier now goes 2, 6, 8, 10 instead of 4, 9, 16, 25.

This helps make the entire queue more relevant, which is really important with the base bonuses and penalties being higher, and with more civilians being present.

Overall the above changes have you playing from the entire queue now, and sometimes having to take some negative points temporarily in order to get a better position later. Also... slums are just really a problem. They are a powerful positive force in terms of running out civilians that are blocking you, but then they are really negative in terms of points on some placements later. Those are tricky, and also encourage playing low in the queue on a combo to place a slums and then replace the slums.

Thanks to Misery for a lot of the inspiration for these changes.

Beta 1.801

(Released August 14, 2013)

Fixed a bug in 1.800 where town buildings could not be placed properly.

Thanks to YoukaiCountry for reporting.

Fixed an issue where the Japanese gods had an attack range of 0, which probably was causing some oddities.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Fixed a bug where the toggle for turning on multiplayer on an existing game was not working.

Thanks to Oralordos for reporting.

During the setup phase in the tutorial, the undo function is now disabled because it can actually prevent you from finishing the tutorial. After the setup phase, it's fine.

Updated the visuals for the sidebar window where it shows the remaining number of actions; now it shows the word "actions" much smaller than the number so that it always fits in the view, and it also shows the word properly pluralized or not rather than just doing a generic (s) at the end.

Thanks to CC80 for reporting the overhang here.

There is now specific win/loss music selection. It's not NEW music, but it's appropriate.

Win: the title theme in the base game, or "Yamabiko No" in the expansion (once that track is released later).

Loss: "Greek Winter" in the base game, or "Yamabiko No" in the expansion (once that track is released later).

Yes, "Yamabiko No" is used for win and loss in the expansion. But honestly the emotion in it can go either way depending on your mood, and it's a really awesome vocal track that deserves to be in there for all the game ends. :)

The "Soul imprint" actions (bless, convert, and armageddon for now) have been split out into their own separate row in the direct actions menu.

The idea is to make it clearer what your opportunity costs are when you spend souls on one ability versus another.

Gods no longer react to military commandments, and are no longer allowed to attack other gods. Much more interesting if they aren't quickly killing one another.

Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

The basic land types no longer cost a quarter of an action point to place, as it turns out that that was exploitable in a variety of ways.

Thanks to CC80 and Misery for reporting.

Fixed a bug in version 1.600 that was allowing players to carry over more than 9 action points between turns.

Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Because of the addition of Large Towns in the expansion, the restriction for town centers distance apart has been increased by 2. This only affects the distance between a town center and enemy town centers, as allied town centers already have a larger requirement than that.

Expansion-Specific Fixes And Balance Tweaks

The health of the Basan unit has been tripled.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

The currency cost of Otoroshi has gone up 10x, and their attack multiplier versus buildings is now 0.01.

Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

The moonstone cost of the Ittan-Momen has been thirded; it may still need to go down even further than that. Feedback welcome!

Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

The health of the Japanese gods has been increased 30x, so that they actually stay alive longer and are thus more interesting.

Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

The amount of sunstone required for the luminith arks and luminith tower have been reduced to 1/10th their prior value.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

Fixed an issue with Japanese towns accidentally getting bandit-keep-style suffixes.

Omukade and Daidarabotchi are no longer able to affect building ruin tiles or hamlet tiles.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

The attack range bonuses from Observation boxes no longer stack.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Substantial Hamlet Mechanic Refinements And Additions

There are now 5 hamlet building options that are randomly rolled, rather than just three. Additionally, the options go up in power by 4x, 9x, 16x, and 25x respectively, rather than just 2x and 3x.

This provides more options, higher culture rewards from placement, and also really makes which slot you play from a lot more important now.

By definition this means that most of the time the #5 slot is the best choice. But #4 will sometimes really surprise you as being better... and if you are going to play at a really expert level, you're going to want to use all five slots in order to set up combos that you punctuate with playing a slot #5 piece.

In short, this just got a lot easier to play at a basic level (much easier to hit the culture targets in Idyll mode), while at the same time getting a lot more challenging and interesting at a higher level of play since combos are now more rewarding.

Slot number one in the randomly-rolled hamlet tiles list no longer automatically shifts out—that was really confusing, in practice. And it made it so that you couldn't really do long-term planning properly.

The baseline culture from Mayor Residences has quadrupled to compensate for the mean new Mayor civilian that these cause.

Most of the proximity bonuses from Slum tiles have been removed, except for rice fields and dead forests. The bonuses from being next to rice fields has been tripled.

Thanks to Misery for inspiring these changes.

The function of rice fields has been swapped around a fair bit, and the description of them also now notes that they are an excellent way to create a buffer between other kinds of tiles that you may not want to have near one another.

Thanks to Misery for inspiring these changes.

Slums are now only 62.5% as common as they were in prior releases.

Hamlet Civilian Tokens

When you place most hamlet buildings, civilians are either added or cleared from adjacent hamlet buildings (not any other kind of tiles). Added civilians go to a random adjacent tile, and block you from replacing their tile until they are cleared or expire. Clearing civilians affects all adjacent tiles.

Civilians to not move or otherwise do anything except block further tile placement on their tile. However, long-term planning is required in order to keep your hamlet from becoming overcrowded and thus potentially even gridlocked.

Banker

Added by the bank, and lasts for 6 turns unless cleared by slums.

Barkeep

Added by the tavern, and lasts for 6 turns unless cleared by the constable.

Mayor

Added by the mayor's residence, and lasts for 30 turns—and cannot be cleared by any hamlet buildings!

Noble

Added by noble's housing, and lasts for 4 turns unless cleared by slums.

Peasant

Added by peasant housing, and lasts for 4 turns unless cleared by slums or the constable.

Priest

Added by the temple, and lasts for 6 turns unless cleared by slums.

Expansion 1: Hamlet Idyll Game Mode

New Hamlet Idyll game mode is selectable by the game mode dropdown in the start world menu.

Hamlet Idyll plays by completely different rules than the main game. There are no gods, no creatures, no towns, no resources, no bandits, no powers, no expanding land... in short, pretty much nothing from the main game except a limited form of tile placement.

So what is this game mode about? Hamlets and culture, pure and simple. You have a small area in which to create an ever-evolving hamlet, thereby generating culture. If you can generate enough culture before the turn counter reaches zero, you win!

Just as in the main game, Hamlet Buildings can only be placed on Building Ruins (not Grassy Ruins) or on existing Hamlet Buildings.

Hamlets are all about adjacency. When you place a new hamlet building, you will either gain or lose culture depending on what buildings are next to your chosen placement location. "Next to" includes diagonals in the case of hamlets. Once a hamlet building has been placed, it does nothing direct—other than affect the way that future buildings generate culture, of course.

When you place most hamlet buildings, civilians are either added or cleared from adjacent hamlet buildings (not any other kind of tiles). Added civilians go to a random adjacent tile, and block you from replacing their tile until they are cleared or expire. Clearing civilians affects all adjacent tiles.

The five hamlet buttons to the left are a queue. Every time you place a hamlet building, all of the items slide to the left. Any gaps that you created collapse leftward. You will also notice that the queue has numbers after the first entry. These buildings are respectively 4x, 9x, 16x, and 25x more effective (for good or for ill) when you place them. So when you place each item from the queue makes almost as big of a difference as where you put it!

Last tip: did you know that you can hold spacebar to hide tooltips? It's handy to do that while deciding what hamlet building to place.

The turn counts and culture requirements per-difficulty are preliminary at best; these are something we'd like feedback on as you're able to get more familiarity with the mode. Right now it's hard to know just how much culture a really good player can amass in 90 turns, for instance. Or how easy it is for the average player to hit 5000 culture in 50 turns.

Expansion 1: Four New Culture Actions

There is a new "Culture Actions" row in the direct actions menu of the game when expansion 1 is installed.

The Luminith Ark and Luminith Tower have both been moved here for the sake of clarity, even though they are buildings.

The idea is to make it clearer what your opportunity costs are when you spend souls on one ability versus another.

New Culture Action for expansion 1: Super Smite

Regular smite doesn't work on a variety of tiles, as well as not working on tiles that have units standing on them. Regular smite also can't separate town centers from one another on the map. Super smite, on the other hand, lets you smite absolutely anything—gods, town centers, whatever!

Did you know? You can hold shift while clicking in order to super-smite multiple tiles. This actually works with doing any sort of action or tile/unit placement from the left sidebar!

Costs 500 culture.

New Culture Action for expansion 1: Reverse Time

The ultimate do-over: roll back the clock by 10 turns, giving you more time to hit score goals... or just to pump up your score in general!

Note: this rolls back the turn count by ten turns, but does not otherwise change the game state (though you may drop into a lower Age.

Costs 4000 culture.

New Culture Action for expansion 1: Stop Woe

Protection straight from The Master! The current and next Woes are both canceled, and an Upheaval is scheduled for hitting fifteen turns out.

Costs 4000 culture.

Large Towns

New Culture Action for expansion 1: Enlarge Radius Of Town

The radius of normal towns is 7x7, giving you 24 plots in which to construct buildings around your town center. The radius of a large town is 9x9, giving you 48 plots in which to construct buildings around your town center!

This is useful for all sorts of things, but in particular can help you to create powerhouse economic towns that use Town Specialization (on higher difficulties) to their great advantage.

Fields, hills, marshes, forests, inhabited forests, and dead forests now all cost only 0.25 AP to place. This lets these be substantially more attractive, and thus actually used in more cases!

Added a new "Suppress Tooltips" keybind, which defaults to spacebar (which is already in use, but these two don't conflict with one another).

Holding this key down keeps the tooltips about units and tiles from showing up, giving you a better view of what you are doing. Great for when you want to evaluate what the placement values of hamlet buildings are.

The victory message when you win via Armageddon is now a lot more specific.

Fixed a bug that could happen if a world map tile tried to change type when there were no units or tokens on the board (don't ask).

Thanks to Mick and nas1m for reporting.

Fixed a crash bug where the game could lock up in the prior version.

Thanks to CC80, Misery, and blastpop for reporting.

Expansion-Specific Fixes And Balance Tweaks

Otoroshi is no longer able to damage buildings.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

Fixed Maikubi so that it only happens for one turn, not for five!

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

The horse cost of Wako has been thirded.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

Shinigami incense cost increased from 15 to 50.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

On the tooltips for units that are immune to counterattack (like Shinobi), that ability now shows in green like other similar abilities.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

On the tooltips for the barracks and other production buildings, not all of the green abilities were showing at all, and they were showing oddly off to the side. Fixed.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

The description of the Jubokko now includes the explanation that Onryo give you 5 souls when they die.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

The Hou-ou now costs fewer jewelry, and gives 8x points on death.

Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

Bamboo Forests now only cost 1 AP to place instead of 2.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

Expansion 1: Cultural Victory (New Win Condition!)

Added a new expansion-specific resource: Culture

The measure of a civilization's enlightenment, taste, and moral faculties. Allows certain powerful abilities and buildings to be used by The Creator.

Placing Hamlet buildings in a strategic fashion generates culture.

Right now this just is useful for the cultural victory (see below), but a couple of more key abilities related to this are coming soon (large towns, for instance).

Added a new expansion-specific building: Luminith Ark

An important stepping-stone to a Cultural Victory. Construct a ring of 8 of these with a Luminith Tower in the center to win the game!

Costs 100 sunstone and 500 culture to create.

Note that this cost is purely speculative, and probably needs adjustment up or down. Feedback welcome!

Added a new expansion-specific building: Luminith Tower

The keystone of a Cultural Victory. Only once there is a ring of 8 Luminith Arks can this be built in the center. The construction of one of these towers signifies the beatification of the entire continent by The Master.

Once a Luminith Tower is constructed, your score is immediately multiplied 20x, and you win the game via a Cultural Victory!

Costs 200 sunstone and 1000 culture to create.

Note that this cost is purely speculative, and probably needs adjustment up or down. Feedback welcome!

Expansion 1: Hamlets!

The "Hamlet Idyll" game mode is not quite fully baked, but is getting very close. That is unfortunately the ideal way to just experiment and get familiar with hamlets, but we should have that out tomorrow. In the meantime, you can experiment freely in sandbox mode if you want.

Beyond that, actually let's just see what you make of the new hamlets and their buildings. If there is anything unclear on how to use them, then please let us know and we'll work on addressing that.

TIP: Ignore everything we said in the past about hamlets.

Okay, actually, the following help text can now be found in the game via a button directly next to the hamlet buttons in the Other Buildings menu:

Hamlets are a fun and useful game within a game' inside Skyward Collapse. The solitary goal of hamlets is to use them to generate the Culture resource. Culture can be used to achieve an alternate form of victory and to create Large Towns, among other things.

The three hamlet buttons that you see next to this button are all randomly rolled Hamlet Buildings out of a list of eleven types of Hamlet buildings. Some of the Hamlet Buildings are very rare (Mayor's House), while others are much more common. Most of the buildings are fairly positive in nature, except for Slums, which are pretty negative (but still can net you some culture if you are careful with them).

Placing hamlet tiles is resource-free, as well as being inexpensive in Action Points. However, you are constrained on where you can place these buildings: they can only be placed on Building Ruins (not Grassy Ruins) or on existing Hamlet Buildings.

Hamlets are all about adjacency. When you place a new hamlet building, you will either gain or lose culture depending on what buildings are next to your chosen placement location. "Next to" includes diagonals in the case of hamlets. Once a hamlet building has been placed, it does nothing direct—other than affect the way that future buildings generate culture, of course.

The three hamlet buttons to the left are a queue. Every time you place a hamlet building, all of the items slide to the left. Any gaps that you created collapse down. You will also notice that the queue has numbers after the second two entries. These buildings are 2x and 3x more effective (for good or for ill) when you place them. So when you place each item from the queue makes almost as big of a difference as where you put it!

Last tip: did you know that you can 'hold Spacebar to hide tooltips? It's handy to do that while deciding what hamlet building to place.

New hamlet building: Nobles' Housing

The aristocratic class likes to live near beautiful scenery, other rich people, and amenities like banks and temples. They don't want to live next to peasants or ugly terrain, and can't stand being anywhere near slums.

New hamlet building: Peasant Housing

Peasants are, naturally, the backbone of the economy in small villages like this. They need a place to work, and greatly prefer having a place to drink as well as hills to retreat to if vagabonds come to call. They also really don't want to live right next to the constable's watchful eye.

New hamlet building: Slums

The seedy underbelly of civilization. These should be kept as far away from higher society as possible, while providing some sources of food and drink. Dead forests for the denizens here to skulk around in are a plus, too.

New hamlet building: Rice Field

Rice fields are an excellent source of nourishment for the lower-class peasants, but tend to get raided by vagabonds. The rice crop is sensitive to the nearby terrain for optimum yield.

New hamlet building: Bank

Nobles have to have a place to store all that wealth! But vagabonds want to steal from banks, and the presence of nearby peasants make the nobles turn their noses up.

New hamlet building: Constabulary

Someone has to provide some security around here! Nobles are reassured by the presence of the law, and peasants and vagabonds are quelled somewhat.

New hamlet building: Granary

Provides both food as well as a place for peasants to work. Works best with a source of water nearby. Vulnerable to raiding by vagabonds.

New hamlet building: Mayor's Residence

The seat of power in a hamlet. Mayors do the most good with the nobles and peasants, but do not deal at all well with the presence of vagabonds. And forget about having two mayors too close to one another: oh the infighting!

New hamlet building: Tavern

A place to gather, to drink, and especially to arrange quests into nearby grassy ruins. Best kept away from higher society. Highly advised to be near a peasant workplace.

New hamlet building: Temple

The spiritual center of any hamlet. Ministers to people from any walk of life, but more effective the higher class their constituents. Not a good idea to have near to secular authorities or adventuring spots.

New hamlet building: Weavers

A great source of nice clothes, tapestries, and other finery. Provides work for peasants, and key goods for nobles. Extra effective if placed near hill country, where sheep may be found.

Fixed a bug that was actually an old bit of intentional (but bad idea) code where gods would do "super jumps" over tiles if they could not reach a target token they were trying to reach.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

The passive bonus of Zeus has been redefined: gods are no longer immune to direct attack, but instead just have 20x their normal health. This plays a lot better with the new Japanese faction gods, rather than creating potentially unwinnable situations when Zeus faces the Japanese.

Put in a fix for a crash that could occur when trying to start a new game in version 1.501 or greater if you had the old-style Sandbox difficulty as your default in a prior version.

When you start a new sandbox game—this does not apply to existing ones—it now lets you directly place any bandit-specific units you like (though they will belong to the faction you are playing for at the time).

Fixed a longstanding bug (that we just found out, but it's been there forever) where a ranged unit that was attacking an immune-to-ranged-attacks unit like Cerberus or Ushi-oni would have to close to one tile away, but then would attack from range rather than from up close.

Fixed a bug where if a unit would "jump" over an enemy if they were trying to attack a different tile that was beyond the enemy they were trying to move past. This only occurred under certain circumstances, mainly when there was not an alternate route and potentially more frequently when the moving unit could not damage the unit that was in its way.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Fixed a bug introduced in beta 1.501 that was making the tutorial send you into sandbox mode instead of actually letting you play the tutorial.

Thanks to Zenchess for reporting.

Previously you could wipe out the former type of a tile by placing a building and then undoing that action. This would then convert the tile into just plain field. Thankfully nobody found this exploit. :) Fixed so that it returns the former tile to its former status when you undo.

Revised Costs For God-Specific Japanese Mythological Creatures

Most (all?) of these were put in without costing any sunstone/moonstone... oops. All of the mythological creatures now cost sunstone or moonstone to place (often in addition to other resources.)

New Japanese Gods (For Expansion 1 - Now All 8 of 8 In Place And Available To Use)

Suijinsama

God of water. While Suijinsama lives, all allied human units gain the Water Crosser ability. This lets them cross marshes and lakes with no penalties at all! Additionally, they get a 10x attack bonus when striking out of lakes, and 5x attack bonus when striking out of marshes.

Izanagi

Father of most of the gods for the Japanese faction. While he lives, all Japanese gods from any faction have 20x their normal health.

The greater god Suijinsama is now enabled for use in the game, since all of his related mythologicals are now fully implemented.

The lesser god Fujin is now enabled for use in the game, since all of his related mythologicals are now fully implemented.

The lesser god Ebisu is now enabled for use in the game, since all of his related mythologicals are now fully implemented.

The greater god Izanagi is now enabled for use in the game, since all of his related mythologicals are now fully implemented.

The greater god Raijin is now enabled for use in the game, since all of his related mythologicals are now fully implemented.

The lesser god Uke Mochi is now enabled for use in the game, since all of her related mythologicals are now fully implemented.

New Japanese God-Specific Mythological Creatures (For Expansion 1 - Now All 24 In Place)

Some of the pre-existing Japanese god-specific units now give more points on death:

Amaterasu's Enenra: 2x

Amaterasu's Ushi-oni: 4x

Amaterasu's Okuri-Inu: 5x

Kagu-tsuchi's Basan: 2x

Kagu-tsuchi's Nue: 5x

Kagu-tsuchi's Hou-ou: 3x

New god-specific mythological creature for Suijinsama: Daidarabotchi

Giant responsible for creating most of the lakes and ponds in Japan. Every tile he steps on becomes a lake unless it is a building. Worth 3x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Suijinsama: Nure-Onna

Every human unit within range 3 is struck dead at the start of each turn when she is on a lake or bridged lake. Worth 4x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Suijinsama: Kawauso

River otters with a very low speed and attack. For every one of these otters on the map, all units of all factions get a 2x attack bonus while on a lake, bridged lake, or marsh. Worth 2x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Fujin: Tengu

Troublemaker bird of prey. Doesn't attack bandits, and cannot be attacked by bandits. Any non-god unit it attacks without killing becomes a bandit, and immediately grants points as if that unit had died.

New god-specific mythological creature for Fujin: Zorigami

Immune to ranged attack. Does no damage. Wanders at random at speed 1. All human units from any faction that come within range 2 of it get their AP permanently quadrupled. Worth 4x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Fujin: Bakezori

An old sandal that was mistreated, and now runs through the house chanting "kararin, kororin, kankororin!" All enemy units within sight range of this annoying creature will consider it the very highest priority to attack if they can do so. Very high health. Worth 2x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Ebisu: Ittan-Momen

A roll of cotton cloth that attacks people by wrapping them up. Any non-god unit it attacks becomes permanently unable to move (but still able to counterattack). Worth 4x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Ebisu: Nuppeppo

A passive, genderless, blobby creature that does not move and deals no damage. All human units from any faction that come within range 3 of it become paralyzed by its extreme smell, which is almost like rotting flesh. Worth 2x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Ebisu: Mujina

Mystical badger with mid-power attacks. Particularly known for shapeshifting and deceiving humans. Any humans from any faction that come within range 2 of it become fearful of faceless ghosts in enemy buildings; they cease being able to walk on or attack enemy buildings, and become unable to move if they are already on an enemy building. Worth 2x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Izanagi: Gagoze

A lazy priest-servant turned demon-ghost who likes to kill children. No barracks, archery range, or siege workshop can produce units while he's within range of 3.

New god-specific mythological creature for Izanagi: Keukegen

Cute and cuddly-looking, he nonetheless is a big cause of disease. You don't want to find one of these in your house. The turn after he is placed, the next woe strikes, ending the current woe. Worth 8x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Izanagi: Hihi

A baboon monster that is invincible while in bamboo forests. Transfers this attribute to any enemies that it attacks. Worth 3x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Raijin: Baku

Devour dreams and nightmares. Each turn, a single random non-god unit with bonuses (enemy or allied) within range of 3 will have all its bonuses wiped out. In place of those bonuses, a single Nightmare bonus will be applied to that unit: this makes them invulnerable to attack, but also inverts their auto-heal. Worth 3x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Raijin: Ningyo

A fisherman catching one of these was believed to cause storms and misfortune. These have a very low attack power, but will insta-kill most humans who attack them. Worth 2x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Raijin: Akateko

Literally translated as "the red-handed child," the Akateko is a tree with a bright red infant's hand dangling from it. Freaky, right? Non-god units that attack it feel the same way, and die of fright. The tree is unable to move, and has almost no health, but kills even those enemies who attack it from range.

New god-specific mythological creature for Uke Mochi: Tanuki

A raccoon-dog that is excellent at disguising itself to make people look stupid. Any human units that come within range 2 of it get struck with human vanity. Worth 2x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Uke Mochi: Kodama

Spirits that normally live in certain trees in the inner reaches of mountains. Killing a Kodama via direct attack brings misfortune in the form of the loss of ten human soul imprints from the stockpile of the Kodama's faction. Worth 10x the normal number of points on death.

New god-specific mythological creature for Uke Mochi: Kitsune

A nine-tailed fox that is very old and wise. Many people give kitsune offerings because of their supposed power and influence, almost as if they were a deity. Every turn, each enemy human unit within range 4 generates the equivalent of 1/10th of a soul imprint for the Kitsune's faction.

New Bandit-Only Mythological Creatures (For Expansion 1 - Now All 6 In Place)

Added a new bandit-only unit: Namazu

Giant catfish who lives in the mud under the continent of Luminith, restrained by the god Kashima; when Kashima lets his guard down, Namazu thrashes around, causing earthquakes. On the start of every turn, a random non-town-center tile within 6 of Namazu gets smited.

Only appears in the Age of Monsters and before.

New bandit-only mythological creature: Dorotabo

Zombies that try to pull themselves out of the ground but cannot, and so do not move. Every turn, a new bandit Dorotabo appears in at a random new location for roughly each three existing Dorotabo on the map. A Dorotabo infestation can get quickly out of hand, but they will stop multiplying at 20 total on the map. Worst of all, they give hardly any points when you kill them!

Appears in the Age of Gods only.

New bandit-only mythological creature: Onibaba

Unstoppable demon-hag that is immune to all attacks. Unable to attack mythological creatures, gods, or buildings; but does extreme damage to humans. When more than one is on the map at a time, the oldest ones turn to stone until there is only one.

Only appears in the Age of Gods.

Beta 1.502

(Released August 2, 2013)

Put in some protections to prevent invalid Japanese gods from being selected and then causing an exception when you try to open the god tokens menu for them.

Lots And Lots Of Base Game Housekeeping

The desciption of Xiphos was saying that they were resistant to archers when instead it was cavalry.

Thanks to Misery and LordGek for reporting.

Fixed a bug in the prior version of the game where the off-continent tiles would not show up with red or green highlights during town center placement.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

The diamond cost of trolls has been doubled, and trolls now have an incredibly-effective defensive bonus against other mythologicals (thus giving them a unique niche).

Thus these are now great for taking out other mythos, but then you have to find some humans to finish these off once you're done with that.

If the revised diamond cost seems like too much, we can adjust it; but this is pretty darn powerful.

Thanks to vehementi and Misery for suggesting trolls needed a buff of some sort.

Complete Chimera rebalance, since they were so underpowered before:

They now have 5 AP instead of 9.

They no longer can be attacked from a distance.

They now get 40x attack bonuses against infantry, cavalry, and archers. Great for killing humans pumped up with crazy bonuses.

Thanks to vehementi for suggesting these get a buff.

Previously, the Chair of Forgetfulness could be overridden by other AP-boosting effects, such as Entertained (among others). Fixed.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Fixed a bug that would let upgrades to units and buildings be affected by things that made placement of that building or unit free (things like Hera or Delos).

Thanks to MoogleGunner, nas1m, and Misery for reporting.

The font for the chat message log has been updated to the newer and more attractive font style.

A number of things have been added to make the per-turn events more clear:

There is now a big central-screen message every turn counting down when a Catastrophic Woe is incoming.

Every time a pulse of a Woe like serial killer strikes, or a single-hit woe strikes, a message now pops up about it in the chat log.

Every time an ongoing-effect Woe starts being active (such as armsman revolt, etc), a message now pops up about it in the chat log.

Every time a event-style token is activated, a message now pops up about it in the chat log.

Thanks to Pepisolo and Warpstorm for suggesting.

Previously, it was accidentally possible for you to upgrade enemy buildings, and it even would happen without costing any resources. Fixed.

Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Non-god units that spawn during the Frailty woe now automatically come in with 1 health. Previously they would spawn in with full health and then get their health reduced the following turn.

Thanks to vehementi for suggesting.

The failure message for missing score targets has been improved to be a bit more informative:

Missed Score Target: Only {0} Out Of {1}

Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

Fixed an issue with some of the token abilities where they could cause an exception if an unit had died right before they tried to grant them a bonus.

Thanks to Taisuru for reporting.

Fixed a longstanding issue where Skadi's passive bonus (free archery range units) was only partially taking effect: it would show the costs as nothing, and let the units be produced even if you did not have all the resources, but still would draw down whatever resources you did have that it could take.

Thanks to zharmad, Winge, Mick, Cinth, and Draxis for reporting.

Corrected some free-floating pixels on all four of the inhabited forest tiles, and on one of the marsh tiles.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

If the enemy has less than or equal to the number of units that your faction does when you play Tyr's Scales, previously it would just sit around and do nothing. Now it will kill two units if at all possible, and disappear either way.

Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

When you miss a score gate, it now tells you at the start of the turn, rather than waiting until after that turn (you have no hope of affecting the outcome either way during that time, so it just saves you some pointless fiddling).

Sandbox Mode Improvements

A new "Game Mode" dropdown has been added to the start menu.

For the base game, this includes Normal and Sandbox.

Sandbox difficulty level has thus been removed, and moved over to here. This lets you set a specific difficulty level for your sandbox play session.

For the first expansion, this dropdown also will include a new Hamlet Idyll mode.

Thanks to cnemus for suggesting the separate game mode for sandbox.

In sandbox mode, new controls are now available in the menu that you can open with the L key:

Max Out Action Points (allowing you to have more actions when you are not in free-placement mode anymore).

Add 100 Of Each Resource

When the Tutorial general difficulty is selected, it now hides all of the other game options except for the sky type, because all of them are pre-set by the tutorial anyhow.

In order to not make this look completely awkward, the difficulty settings have also been moved to the top row instead of the bottom row on the start screen.

Expansion-Specific Fixes And Balance Tweaks

Japanese gods are now allowed to step on buildings.

Japanese gods no longer show the inaccurate "does not normally move" text on their status.

The Japanese gods now all have a large penalty when attacking buildings, and in general will vastly prefer to attack units instead of buildings now. This way they aren't really hurting enemy towns directly, they are just acting as huge suppressants for enemy forces, which is bad enough.

Sohei now require venison rather than ale, as Bushi already required ale. There aren't supposed to be duplicates there among a single building on a faction.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

The Bushi have now been heavily differentiated from the Sohei. The Bushi now are extremely powerful—far beyond any other human unit without bonuses—but require a currency payoff to be produced.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

The Torii token has had its iron costs swapped out for diamond (ouch), and its incense cost doubled, and has had its cooldown between uses increased substantially.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

Yumi and Wako are now considered both Archers and Cavalry, rather than just Archers.

Wako now requires horses instead of steel.

They also now have a much higher AP, paired with a much higher AP per shot, and double the range they previously had.

Their attack power is also now vastly higher, since they have fewer shots.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting that these be better differentiated from Kyudoka.

Kyudoka now requires a water flask instead of lumber.

They also now have a range that is 2 higher than they previously had, making it truly massive.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting that these be better differentiated from Wako.

New ability for the Komainu: When they die, they do a powerful explosion that strikes all of the neighboring tiles (even those diagonally adjacent). The explosion damage hurts all enemies and allies alike.

The total number of action points required to place a tile or entity is now always shown next to the name of that which will be placed at the top of the tooltip.

The game now supports fractional action point costs; this lets us have action point costs that are less than 1 AP, which will be really useful for the hamlets stuff in the first expansion (and potentially for some other things later on, too).

Made some adjustments to the building placement visuals so that it's easier to tell you where you can place buildings.

Fixed an issue with the coloring during the town center placement mode where it was showing ruin/building tiles as red when they could not be placed-upon (like ruins, etc).

Fixed a bug in the unit AI that was causing them to get stuck near enemy town centers and loiter around in some cases.

Fixed a bug in recent versions where some tokens or woes, such as Monster Pandemonium, could spawn expansion 1 units without expansion 1 being installed.

Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

The graphics for obsidian have been made more attractive, based on the graphics for the existing marsh tiles. These are very blacked-out but still have dark grasses and some highlights and such rather than being so uniformly dark.

Adjusted the timing of how the "new unit has appeared" logic works. This should now work better on a variety of playback speeds, whereas before it was working kind of funky.

The map types you get to select from in the map type dropdown are now sorted alphabetically.

Some resource-producer balance:

Ranches now produce 1 horse per turn rather than 0.5 horses per turn.

Clay pits now produce 7 clay per turn rather than 10.

Rock quarries now produce 4 rock per turn rather than 5.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

A couple of god token balance changes:

Njord's Coins have had their costs increased from 1 moonstone to 5 sunstone.

Njord's Reginnaglar has had its cost increased from 2 moonstone to 2 sunstone.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Hard general difficulty now only gets a 4x points multiplier rather than 5x like Expert does.

Thanks to Warpstorm for reporting that these were the same!

Fixed a text offset issue in the save and load game listings in the prior version of the game (thanks to the font switch).

For Expansion 1: Nihon no Mura (For Expansion Preorder Customers)

General New Map Tiles

Expansion 1: Added a new military-category building for all factions: Military Outpost.

Allows you to project force out of your towns—place these, and any enemy units crossing them will be damaged by an "attack of opportunity" from the outpost.

But beware: these cannot be smited, and military units will not choose to attack this (they will only damage this if they are attacking another unit who happens to be standing on this tile). So place with care, as they will become a semi-permanent fixture!

These cost nontrivial amounts of lumber and diamonds to place, so they aren't exactly cheap. But they are a great way to project military force around the map in new ways.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

Expansion 1: Added a new Blight tile type that you can place from the terrain types menu.

Every turn that there is a blight tile somewhere on the map, two new blight tiles will form at random next to existing blights. The new blight tiles can take over buildings, but they won't take over ruins, bandit keeps, ally camps, monster caves, or town centers.

Expansion 1: Added a new Bamboo Forest tile type that you can place from the terrain types menu.

Every turn, a single random unit within any of the bamboo forests on the map is purified—meaning that the unit will lose all its bonuses.

New Map Types

Expansion 1: Chaos Isle

A land of even higher unpredictability than the Plateau of Circumstance. All tile types, including those from any and all installed expansions, have a near-equal chance of popping up as the land continues to build itself, which means that every game plays out differently... and crazily. Note that statistical clustering will sometimes make it seems like there are patterns or weighting where there is none. This is an illusion!

Expansion 1: Kangi Blight

DIFFICULT MAP! The land is generally unpredictable, with a high chance of all of the base game an Nihon no Mura tile types. However, blight tiles appear uncomfortably often...

Expansion 1: Gunma Bamboo Grove

The land is generally unpredictable, with a near-equal chance of all of the base game and Nihon no Mura tile types. However, bamboo forest tiles appear much more often, purifying the bonuses off of units quite frequently.

Japanese Faction (All 12 of 12 Human Units)

Expansion 1: New Japanese Faction

The Japanese have a very unusual pantheon of gods and associated mythological units. Their gods are much more active than usual, walking around and smiting mortals; and rather than providing access to god tokens, they provide access to a huge array of unique per-god creatures.

Note that you can still only play with two teams (red and blue) at once. But now you have more choices of which faction goes for each red and blue.

All of the Japanese Barracks, Archery Range, Siege, and Ally Camp units are now fully functional and implemented with their various specialties.

The Japanese town centers have 50% more health than the Norse or Greek ones, but they cost more to upgrade and get much lower health boosts when they are upgraded. They also have a lower counterattack strength.

The Japanese barracks and archery range produce units every 3 turns rather than every 4 (for the Greek) or 5 (for the Norse).

They also have 9k health rather than 7k.

The Japanese siege workshop produces units every 5 turns rather than every 2 (for the Greek) or 3 (for the Norse).

They also have 6k health rather than 7k.

New Japanese General-Use Mythological Creatures (All 5 of 5)

New general-use Japanese mythological creature: Otoroshi

Pounces on the first enemy unit it attacks, killing that unit and itself. Cannot attack gods or mythological creatures.

Highly unusual in that this costs currency to summon.

New general-use Japanese mythological creature: Kirin

A rare form of unicorn. Kirin is fully healed whenever a level 4 human unit dies within range 3 of it.

New general-use Japanese mythological creature: Kamaitachi

A weasel with sickles instead of feet. Heavy hitter that does half-power splash damage to units on the the tiles cardinally adjacent to its target (but not the adjacent buildings).

New general-use Japanese mythological creature: Komainu

Immobile lion statues that normally guards shrines. Has massive health, but also heavy self-attrition that will kill it in just a few turns. Has no attack strength.

New general-use Japanese mythological creature: Shogoro

A hundred year old gong that has come to life. All allied units within 10 of this will move to this as if it was a military commandment. The gong moves slowly towards the nearest enemy buildings.

New Japanese Mythological Tokens (All 8 of 8)

New Japanese mythological token: Jubokko

Vampire tree. They live on the blood of combanants, and historically sprouted on places that were former battlefields. Lasts for 5 turns. For every human unit that dies, an Onryo of the same faction appears in its place.

New special-case mythological unit: Onryo

Vengeful spirit come back to seek revenge in the land of the living. Gives back 5 souls whenever it dies.

The only way to get this unit is via using the Jubokko token.

New Japanese mythological token: Ryu

The first human to pick this up gains the power of a dragon. They are granted a ranged attack of 5 if doesn't already have a higher ranged attack. Also gains x25 attack power and x25 health.

Luminescant Heron. Lasts for 5 turns. All gods become blinded and unable to move during this time.

New Japanese mythological token: Torii

Gateway from the profane to the sacred. Lasts for 5 turns. At the end of each turn, all bandit units are killed and you get double points for them.

New Japanese mythological token: Shinigami

The grim reaper. Lasts for 5 turns. All mythological creatures and humans get killed at the end of each turn.

New Japanese mythological token: Maikubi

After one turn, they cause all of the spawn counters (monster cave, bandit keep, ally camps) to max out and trigger all at once.

New Japanese mythological token: Waira

A large beast that lives in the mountains. Little is known about it. Lasts for 5 turns. At the end of each turn, both red and blue get a Hibagon at a random location on the map.

New special-case mythological unit: Hibagon

Powerful Yeti that deals 10x damage when striking from mountains.

The only way to get this unit is via using the Waira token.

New Japanese Gods (6 of 8, With 2 Playable Now)

Note: Only Kagu-tsuchi and Amaterasu will actually be playable in the first beta of the expansion, as only they have all the special abilities of their related mythological creatures coded in. The rest are partially implemented and will follow soon.

New Japanese Lesser God: Kagu-tsuchi

Demigod of fire. While he is living, all allied units get a 1.5x bonus against enemy buildings, thanks to having fire augments on their weapons.

Extremely slow moving. Any units from any faction that come within range of 1 of him turn "mirthfully insane" permanently, and get a 20x attack bonus against all enemy units, but not against buildings or gods.

New Japanese Lesser God: Fujin

God of wind. All allied units that come within range 3 of him get their AP tripled permanently.

New Japanese Greater God: Amaterasu

Sun Goddess. Any bandit units that come within range 2 of her are converted to her faction.

New Japanese Greater God: Raijin

God of thunder and storms. All enemy units that come within range 2 become "extremely fearful" and have their health permanently reduced to 10% of its normal value.

According to legend, can metamorphose into a black cloud and fly. On Luminith this is not strictly true: instead the Nue can run incredibly far across the terrain with its massive amount of AP; but its attacks cost a similarly massive amount of AP, so it can only attack twice despite being able to get anywhere on the battlefield in practically one turn.

New god-related mythological creature for Kagu-tsuchi: Hou-ou

The arrival of these Phoenix-like birds mark the birth of a virtuous ruler. The turn after they are placed, a random human unit from any faction on the map when they are gets a "strong leader" bonus, which gives that human the ability to grant, per turn, any one allied human unit within 5 of them a permanent 15x attack boost.

New god-related mythological creature for Amaterasu: Enenra

Can only be seen by the pure of heart, so is unable to interact with bandits: it can neither deal damage to nor receive damage from bandits.

New god-related mythological creature for Amaterasu: Ushi-oni

Protectors in the form of an Ox-Demon. Thought to drive away evil spirits, these have a large bonus against mythological creatures. They are also immune to ranged attack, and refuse to move.

New god-related mythological creature for Amaterasu: Okuri-Inu

Some wolves are known for following people to protect them. Any allied human units who are within 2 tiles of the Okuri-Inu are invulnerable to attack from enemies.

Bandit-Only Mythological Units (3 of 6)

New bandit-only mythological creature: Omukade

For each non-building tile this giant centipede crosses, it turns those into bamboo forest.

These are present only through the Age of Monsters.

New bandit-only mythological creature: Satori

Giant ape that can read minds and thus is expert at dodging attacks from most humans.

These are present only through the Age of Monsters.

New bandit-only mythological creature: Kamikiri

One-hit kills the first mythological creature that it attacks, and also dies itself.

These are present only in the Age of Gods.

Beta 1.405

(Released July 18, 2013)

Fixed an unhandled exception that could happen when units were turned to stone.

Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Beta 1.404

(Released July 18, 2013)

Fixed an issue where the prior version was allowing some expansion-specific bandit units (sappers, etc) to spawn. But they had invisible images and didn't really work properly since they are not fully implemented yet.

Altered the Xiphos to be super-resistant to cavalry damage instead of archers, since that is more easily countered by the Norse (since Xiphos are also super-resistant to Infantry).

Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

Previously the resources on the right-hand sidebar would sometimes rounded up instead of down, which could lead to frustrating cases where it looked like you had X of a resource but actually did not. Now it rounds down instead.

Thanks to Pepisolo for reporting.

Fixed an error in the tooltip talking about how your faction does not currently control any gods.

Thanks to Ipkins for reporting.

Pan's Goat no longer drops currency or soul imprint resource drops.

Thanks to vehementi for suggesting.

Resource drops are now highlighted properly when you have the token filter mode on.

All units that are produced from ally camps now have an "independent" bonus.

This bonus makes it so that they do not give a soul on death (so you can't farm them), and it also makes it so that they will neither give nor receive damage to/from bandits. They'll just head for the nearest enemy forces or town.

The idea here is that this way the bandits and the ally camps don't balance each other out; that was never the intent, anyway. Both are meant to be threats to the balance of your towns and nothing else.

The "action replay" model has been updated to segregate more functions into their own code methods, so that when a rare exception happens, we know much more closely where it was.

If you are missing some buildings required to produce a unit, it now shows you that no matter what.

Previously it was only showing you that if you were missing the buildings AND you did not have enough resources to produce the unit.

Thanks to vehementi for reporting.

Visual Upgrades: Effects, Fonts, City Borders

The fonts of the game have been completely redone, at the request of a number of players. Things are now much more attractive and slightly more legible (legibility wasn't really a problem before).

Always-on city borders with the color of the city have been added. This greatly helps with the clarity of where the city borders are.

If anyone winds up not liking this and wants a toggle to turn these off, then by all means let me know and we can add a settings option for this.

Thanks to topper for suggesting.

When units or tiles die, they now do a different animation than before: they are sliced in half vertically, and blacken as they fade out.

Thanks to Bluddy for inspiring these changes.

There is now a little burst particle effect when a token is picked up, which makes it clearer what is going on with that when it happens (so it's never confused with just a regular attack, this way).

When units attack tiles or enemies, there is now a little slash animation that shows where damage was dealt, as well as showing whether or not the attacker took counterattack damage or not.

The moonstone mines have been altered to look cooler and be more visually distinct from the diamond mines.

Thanks to vehementi for suggesting.

Insane And Torment Difficulty Levels

Two new General Difficulties have been added to the game.

Insane has been added after the existing Expert mode.

However, Insane works more or less like Expert used to. And Expert now works more or less like Hard used to.

Hard now works like a cross between the old Normal and the old Expert. This serves to let players get the various new mechanics that were previously only Hard+, but without getting the hugely inflated numbers of bandits from there.

Torment has been added after the new Insane mode.

This one is all-new, and basically is a more severe version of what Expert used to be. A couple of the most-unpleasant Woes are now reserved for this, and in general this is a more challenging mode.

Fun fact: we wanted to call this mode "Nightmare," but because players refer to their difficulties by first letter, that would clash with Normal. Nobody will mistake T for Tutorial, so Torment fits well.

Thanks to nas1m and Misery for inspiring the Hard and Torment modes, respectively.

Old savegames have their general difficulty levels upgraded into the new general difficulty scale as follows:

Medium and down is the same as before.

Old Hard mode becomes new Expert mode (as that is closest to what it was before).

Old Expert mode becomes new Insane mode (as that is closest to what it was before).

Catastrophic Woes now only strike on Hard difficulty and up, rather than Medium and up.

The difficulty ranges for the Woes has been shifted all around.

Most of the ones that used to be Expert-only are now Insane-and-up, although a few are Torment-only.

Most of the ones that previously maxed out at Hard now go through Expert.

The "Paranoia" Woe now only strikes on Hard and Expert, rather than Hard and up.

And a few other miscellaneous changes to balance these out for the new difficulty range.

Fixed a fatal exception that would happen sometimes when Bune creatures were on the map and a unit died.

Thanks to Pepisolo for reporting.

Entities spawned or converted by the following effects now do the gong sound and look at the new entities (like most other new entities do):

Bune converting enemy.

Eldhrimnir

Odin

Tartarus Rising

Labyrinth

NOT Yggdrasil, because that would be insanity.

Tyr's Sword

Hera's Diadem

NOT Idunn's Sviagris, because again: insanity.

Idunn's Eitr

Skadi's Wolf

Athena's Owl

Monster Pandemonium

Elven War

Escaped Giants

Horsepocalypse

Siegfried Is Hired

Thanks to nas1m and Pepisolo for reporting.

The red and blue units spawning from ally camps no longer spawn with bloodlust on hard difficulty and up. That always was just supposed to apply to bandits.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

All of the Norse and Greek units have now lost their mountain-crosser ability.

Only some of them had them before, but the reasons for that had been the mountain cheese strategy (which has since been resolved in a better way) and the siege units getting all stuck in a traffic jam (also which has been fixed in a better way).

When you upgrade a building or unit, the tooltip now properly updates itself without you having to move the mouse away and then back.

What is this "counterattack strength" thing? Well, it makes it so that basically there is a garrison inside the building that does return damage to any unit that attacks them.

This is extremely notable, because now the _placement_ of your military production buildings can matter quite a bit. You can use them as a passive sort of shield for your resource buildings... presuming you want to invest your currency here rather than somewhere else.

Flower Gardens For Building Auto-Heal

Flower gardens, which were pretty useless of late, have now been completely redefined into something very strategically interesting:

Gardens improve the overall health of your town. Every building in a town will be auto-healed 200 health per flower garden in the town.

You can now place as many gardens per town as you wish.

Thanks to Winge, Misery, zharmad, Mick, and Pepisolo for helping to figure out a new purpose for the flower gardens.

The incense cost of trolls has been removed (diamond costs are bad enough).

Thanks to Misery for suggesting that these get tuned downwards a bit.

For the first ten turns of the game, the spawn counter rates for bandit keeps and so forth now runs at half speed, meaning that the arrival of the first bandit keep is now slower (but still something that is randomized).

Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

Toned down the bandit siege units in the early part of the game in particular:

Dragon Trebuchets and Saltpetre Carts no longer appear in the age of man.

The direct attack power of the Siege Drill has been toned waaaay down. It's still dangerous, but no longer insta-death for buildings. A big part of its purpose is just drilling through mountains anyhow.

The attack power of the Field Mechanik has been halved for the same reason as the Siege Drill.

Thanks to Misery for inspiring these changes.

Fixed a bug where repairing buildings was not actually deducting from your currency stores when you did it.

Thanks to BisonMD for reporting.

Tokens no longer grant any points when they are placed, but instead grant points when they are removed from the game board.

This prevents some abuses like placing dangerous high-point-value tokens way out of the way so that nobody actually picks it up but you still get the points for it.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

Previously, currency and soul imprint costs were varying by difficulty level, when they were not supposed to be.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Fixed a bug where if you missed a score target for a given age, it was not actually causing you to lose the game; only the target at the end of the game was causing that.

Bandit Keeps, Monster Nests, and Ally Camps now show their names in a smaller font than towns do, and with yellow coloring, to make them more clearly separated.

The Edge of Civilization now just converts the buildings in the town range into fields, rather than converting ALL the tiles within range of the towns into obsidian. This is still harsh, but not so hugely evil.

Ultima has been completely reworked, and now is allowed to strike on any difficulty level:

The ultimate magic is about to be unleashed, scouring the face of the continent clean. Cities are strong enough to resist, but every land tile on the entire map falls into blank, expressionless fields.

This is incredibly more tame, but also a lot less frustrating. It's also interesting because it basically blanks out the map, making movement unfettered, which is actually potentially an interesting challenge.

Improved the accuracy of line of sight checks.

The name "Stone Mason" in the left sidebar is now just "Mason" so that the words don't blend together with "Carpenter" next to it.

Deer Parks, Breweries, and Wells can now be built starting in the setup phase, rather than requiring that you wait until the age of man.

Mythological units now cost a single human soul imprint to place, but no soul imprints to upgrade.

This introduces a slight human-related cost to the placement of mythological creatures, and places them at odds with the other soul-costing abilities.

Still, this is a pretty tame cost by design, so that you're not having to have a bajillion humans dying in order to get mythologicals out there.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

The pre-existing Dark Elf bandit-only mythological creature now only spawns in the first two ages, never in the age of gods.

Also, this creature now has a type of mythological rather than (oddly) infantry.

Fixed an issue with the minotaur's level 4 attack power; it was only 4500 (lower than it's level 2 values even) instead of being 7000.

When you go into upgrade mode for upgrading humans, it now darkens everything that has no possibility of being upgraded.

When you go into repair mode for buildings, it now darkens everything that cannot be repaired at the moment.

Fixed a pretty big oversight that was letting you convert enemy gods to your faction!

When you go into convert-units-to-your-side mode, it now darkens everything that can't be converted.

Fixed an oversight that was letting you bless building ruins that were near a bandit keep but not in an actual functioning town.

When you go into bless-tiles mode, it now darkens everything that can't be blessed.

Tweaked the level 2-4 unit flags so that they are easier to tell apart, and so that they now have a cool glow to them.

Updated the building flag graphics to be based on the unit flag graphics, which were way more impressive. This also solves the issue of having the levels 2-4 of buildings being properly visually distinguishable.

Tidied up some of the explanation text in the tooltips for the left sidebar, particularly making it clear when you have insufficient resources versus when your expenditure of resources is blocked by a Woe (like Armsman Revolt).

Fixed a bug where the Frailty woe would cause tokens and resource drops to not decay properly.

Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

Monster Caves

Added a new tile type: Monster Cave

A cave full of malevolent creatures just waiting to come out and wipe out both factions. Destroy these when you can!

These spawn on a separate counter from the Bandit Keeps, and only appear during the Age of Monsters and after during normal games. During the tutorial, these don't appear at all until the Age of Gods.

Heavily reworked the spawning rates of the Bandit Keeps so that now they and the Monster Caves spawn at sensible rates on all the difficulties, in a good mix.

This may require some tuning, so please do let us know if you have any feedback.

9 New Bandit-Specific Mythological Creatures

New bandit-only mythological unit: Turlhu

Specializes in drilling heavily-fortified tunnel networks through mountains, thus allowing other units to follow freely. Also deals lots of damage to enemies unlucky to come across it.

New bandit-only mythological unit: Gorgon

Medusa was the most famous of the Gorgons, but by no means the only one. These have an incredibly low movement speed, and quite a wimpy melee attack. That said, every turn a single enemy human unit within her sight range will be turned to stone.

New bandit-only mythological unit: Daeva

A dark imp that is not normally especially strong, but which insta-kills any human units that it attacks that are a lower level than itself.

Only appears in the first two ages.

New bandit-only mythological unit: Grimn

Slashes all cardinally-adjacent enemies with its scythe. Specializes in taking out mythological creatures.

Only appears in the first two ages.

New bandit-only mythological unit: Kappa

A trio of water imps. Able to move effortlessly through lakes and marshes, and receives a 5x attack bonus when attacking out from such a water source.

Only appears in the first two ages.

New bandit-only mythological unit: Haim

Moves slowly, but deals massive amounts of damage to any units that come after it; as well as being able to take a punishing in return. Not at all effective against buildings, however.

Only appears in the first two ages.

New bandit-only mythological unit: Kakus

So terrifying is this serpent-covered nightmare, that all human enemies within its range become unable to move, attack, or even counterattack.

Only appears in the age of gods (third age).

New bandit-only mythological unit: Dryka

This hulking, armored monstrosity commands the battlefield around itself. Not at all effective against buildings, however.

Only appears in the age of gods (third age).

New bandit-only mythological unit: Bune

Incredibly hardy, but not very strong. This deathly bird resurrects any non-god enemy units who die within 3 of it—on its side, at level 4.

Only appears in the age of gods (third age).

Human Unit Diversification, Ally Camps

The well, deer park, and brewery have been moved to the Finished Goods Producers part of the left sidebar, rather than being under Other Buildings. This simply makes a lot more sense.

Additionally, none of these are profile-level-gated anymore, so you can construct them at any time you wish right from when you first start playing Skyward Collapse.

The following units can no longer be directly produced from human military buildings:

Norse Hersir (barracks)

Norse Archer (archery range)

Norse Ballista (siege workshop)

Greek Ekdromos (barracks)

Greek Sfendonitai (archery range)

Greek Siege Tower (siege workshop)

This makes it so that each of the main buildings now only has three units that can be produced there. And since the well, deer park, and brewery are now available from the start of the game, all three of those units in each building are available from the start.

The units that are produced via the Inhabited Forests are now pulling from the three removed units of the faction that the new unit belongs to.

Added a new tile type: Ally Camp

A self-sufficient camp of unique ally warriors living off the land in a wilderness hideaway. Circumstances have encouraged them to come out and fight for their faction.

These now spawn periodically, just like bandit keeps and monster caves do. These individually spawn about a third as often as the bandit keeps, so combined about two thirds as often.

The human military units that were removed from the normal military producer buildings now come out of these. These have half as much health as a bandit keep, and are aligned with a specific faction. So these are yet another source of chaos on the map.

Previously there were distinctions of heavy/light infantry, mythological, and siege units. These have all been condensed down to just single infantry, mythological, and siege classes, without the heavy/light distinctions.

We made very little use of the heavy/light distinctions in a meaningful way previously, and the distinctions were too confusingly obtuse to really be able to be remembered.

Additionally, Pikeman has been wrapped into the Infantry class, and Thrower has been wrapped into the general Archer class, all for the same reasons.

It was extremely difficult to remember offhand what sub-species of unit each type of thing was, making it so that most people just wouldn't even try to understand them. The idea is that now there are few enough flavors that we can do meaningful rock-paper-scissors sorts of bonuses on attack and defense without it being too complex to follow.

It is now possible for units to have defense bonuses instead of just attack bonuses, and in fact most units will now have the defensive bonuses rather than the attack ones.

This makes the units actually a lot more specialized, without going back into that whole "one hit kill" territory all the time.

We strongly considered making the defensive bonuses scale down by general difficulty so that you wouldn't have to consider the rock-paper-scissors aspect so much on those levels... but honestly in the end we thought that would be more confusing since you'd have to re-learn what was needed at each difficulty level.

As it is, these defensive bonuses are enough to be interesting and to make you have to think about what kinds of units you are fielding, but it's not enough (we think, anyway) to make it impossible to win on the lower difficulties if you are not paying close attention to it.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting we look at ways to make the human units more distinctive from one another. We considered doing things like giving them special abilities, but that would really step on the toes of the mythological creatures, so we decided not to do that.

The secondary class distinctions of the mythological creatures have been removed, as that would have really thrown off the bonuses that humans get against those secondary classes, making mythologicals too ineffective.

The descriptions of most of the human military units have been completely reworked to explain better what the heck they are for.

Revamp Of Attack And Defense Bonuses On Units

Centaurs no longer get attack bonuses of 1.1 against throwers and 1.3 against archers.

The attack bonuses of frost giants against mythological creatures has been increased from 1.4x to 3x.

The attack bonuses of light elves and trolls against mythological creatures has been increased from 1.2x to 1.8x.

The attack bonuses of valkyrie against mythological creatures has been increased from 4.5x to 5x.

The attack bonuses of ekdromos against cavalry has been increased from 1.3x to 3x, and a defense bonus of 0.33x against cavalry has been added.

The attack bonuses of peltasts have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.2x against siege and 0.1x against archers have been added.

The attack bonuses of podromos have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.4x against cavalry and 0.1x against infantry have been added.

The attack bonuses of xiphos have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.1x against both infantry and archers have been added.

The attack bonuses of berserks have been wiped out and replaced with a 3x bonus against infantry. They also now have a 0.3x defensive bonus against infantry, and a 0.6x defensive bonus against archers.

The attack bonuses of hersir have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.5x against mythological, and 0.1x against siege, have been added.

The attack bonuses of huscarl have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.1x against both siege and archers have been added.

The attack bonuses of marauders against archers has been increased from 1.2x to 2x, and their bonus against siege has increased from 1.15x to 1.5x.

The attack bonuses of toxotes have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.4x against infantry, and 0.1x against siege, have been added.

The attack bonuses of akontistai have been replaced with a 3x attack bonus against cavalry, and a defense bonus of 0.33x against cavalry.

The attack bonuses of lithovoloi have been replaced with a 4x attack bonus against mythologicals and gods, and a defense bonus of 0.4x against mythologicals and gods.

The attack bonuses of sfendonitai have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.2x against infantry, archers, cavalry, and siege have been added.

The attack bonuses of axe throwers have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.2x against infantry and mythologicals have been added.

The attack bonuses of shotputs have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.2x against archers have been added.

The attack bonuses of draconaria have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.4x against infantry have been added.

The attack bonuses of drukru have been removed, and defensive bonuses of 0.2x against mythologicals have been added.

The upgrade costs of hippo-toxotes were previously blank, but have now been filled in.

Improved Resource Costs Of Human Units For Greater Control Of Production

The resource costs of a number of the human units have been messed around with, to make sure that you have full (or in some cases easier) control over which are built when, depending on what finished goods producers you put in each town.

The idea is that you shouldn't HAVE to have certain units auto-producing when you are really trying to auto-produce something else. That was always the design intent, but we messed it up in a few places.

The hersir now requires horse meat instead of water flasks, and the huscarl is vice-versa.

Marauders and Prodromos now require venison.

Lithovoloi and Xiphos now require ale.

The trojan horse now requires lumber instead of rocks, and also now requires ale.

Oxybeles now require more bacon than before, no longer require bread, and now require venison.

Arsonists now require ale instead of water flasks.

Mortars now require water flasks instead of ale.

Catapults now require more lumber than before, and now require venison instead of horse meat.

Tutorial Update To Account For Revised Unit Costs

The "Build A Rock Quarry" step in the red faction phase of the tutorial has been removed. We need that action for something else now!

A new "Build a Brewery" step has been added in at the end of the red faction phase of the tutorial.

This explains more about how you can control unit production on a per-town basis, and makes it so that berserks are able to be produced when the age of man starts.

Given the new requirements for the various norse units, one new building of some sort was now needed to see any units at all coming from that barracks.

Embassy Revamp

The Embassy graphic has been replaced with the Inn graphic. Given that these are going to be seen a lot more, the Embassy graphics we had before were just never quite working out.

As a consequence of the above, the Inn tile has been removed from the game. There was nothing wrong with it, but it was only a more minor bonus anyhow, and we needed the graphic for the Embassy.

All existing Inns in savegames have been converted to fields.

Diplomats have been removed from the game, as has the concept of enlightenment. Welp, that's the last of the civilians stripped out now!

The function of embassies has been completely revised, since the old function was fiddly as well as extremely underused. It tended to be underpowered in most cases, and overpowered in the few cases where you could actually manage some enlightenment.

The more embassies on the map, for either faction, the slower bandit keeps, monster caves, and ally camps will be to appear. The multiplier that these cause is 0.95 to the power of the count of embassies.

One embassy is 0.95^1, which means a 5% slowdown. Five embassies are 0.95^5, which means a 22.6% slowdown. Ten embassies are a 40.1% slowdown. Twenty = 64.2%. Thirty = 78.5%. Forty = 87.1%. By eighty embassies you have around a 99% slowdown.

Apollo's passive ability previously was:

While Apollo lives, all non-god enemy units have their auto-heal inverted into a life-drain instead.

However, with the new embassy model, something much more interesting is now possible and thus has been added:

Apollo is the god of many, many things. Among those, he is the god of truth and prophecy. While he lives, the tooltips for both embassies and the bandits faction (at the top of the screen) show how soon bandits and similar will spawn.

Apollo's Lyre was related to the old style of diplomacy, and thus needed to have a new function created for it. Now:

The turn after Apollo reaches his instrument, he begins to play a masterful melody. All of the bandit and other similar spawn counters shown on the embassy are reset to 0%, delaying their arrival substantially.

Trade Revamp, New Currency Resource

The previous function of trading posts and bazaars (and thus by extension the entire previous trade model) has been completely removed. Like the function of embassies, this was an area of the game that simply wasn't up to the level of the rest of the game, and which consequently was largely ignored.

A new Currency resource has been added to the game.

Currency is now generated at trading posts and bazaars. 1 currency per turn at trading posts, and 2 per turn at bazaars.

Side note: in the first expansion, the hamlets will be a source of Currency as well as the expansion-specific Culture resource.

The trading post and bazaar have been moved into the raw resource producers section of the left sidebar, since that's what they now are.

Both Njord and Hermes previously had passive abilities relating to the old style of trade, which means they needed to be redefined.

Now they both produce a 15% bonus to trade income for their factions as their passive bonus.

Similarly, Njord's Coins were related to the old trade model and thus needed rework. Their new function:

As soon as his coins have been placed on the map, all allied currency production is doubled until the coins expire.

The Golden Fleece previously had a function relating to the old diplomacy model, so it needed to be redefined. It's now related to the new trade model:

The turn after Poseidon reaches the golden fleece, his faction gains 30 currency for each town they control.

Because he now has a trade-related token, Poseidon now is not available until profile level 2.

Building Upgrades

It is now possible to upgrade all of the raw resource producers, as well as defensive towers, using the new currency resource.

As these are upgraded, they now have a new flag graphic that shows more flags per upgrade level.

All of the above get a health bonus when upgraded, but resource producers also get a 1.1x bonus to the amount of raw resources that they produce.

This lets you build resource-rich towns in a denser fashion if you wish to pursue currency. It also allows you to build extra-defensive tower lines if that's your desire.

This ability is locked until profile level 2, when trading posts also become unlocked.

Note that you can't upgrade trading posts or bazaars with coins; they only have one level. No wishing for more wishes!

Upgraded buildings now grant more points on death. Previously, all buildings granted 150 points on death (in the age of man, anyhow). Now they grant 150, 200, 250, and 300 respectively, for each level of the building.

Building Repair Cost Change

The Repair Building action previously cost no resources, but three action points.

Now it costs no action points, but three currency.

This may need to be tuned, but the idea is to set the repair of buildings against the upgrading of buildings, so you have to choose between them. And also to make repair not quite so untenable in terms of costing a ton of AP. This may ultimately not work balance-wise, but it seems worth a shot.

Note that because of trade not being available until profile level 2, this means that building repairs are also now locked until then.

Profile Level Unlock Changes, Related Achievement Updates

The following profile level unlocks have been changed:

The old 4, 6, and 10 unlocks were removed because those were the well, deer park, and brewery, which you now get from the start of the game.

Additionally, since the inn was removed the level 8 unlock went with it.

Embassy 5 => 4

Bazaar 7 => 5

Artist's Studio 9 => 6

Amphitheater 11 => 7

Coliseum 12 => 8

Statue Of The Creator 13 => 9

The maximum profile level is now 9 instead of 13.

The achievements for reaching profile levels 10 through 13 have been removed.

Adjusted Unit Costs On Higher Difficulties

Higher-difficulty costs have been increased:

The costs of units on hard difficulty have increased by 50% of what they were in the previous versions of the game.

The costs of units on expert difficulty have increased by 50% of what they were in the previous versions of the game (making these now 100% higher than what the Medium difficulty costs are, since in prior versions they were already 50% higher than medium costs).

In general the idea here is to make sure that the economy is sufficiently interesting and difficult to manage on higher difficulties, rather than having there always be a surplus of extra resources sitting around once you get to a certain skill level with the game.

Thanks to Misery and nas1m for suggesting.

Town Specialization On Hard And Expert Difficulties

Town specialization is now rewarded when it comes to resource production:

All raw resource producers have now had their baseline production per turn dropped by 50%.

All of the raw resource producers with the exception of the currency-producers now get a bonus of 25% of their new production values for each additional building of their type in their town beyond the first, up to a maximum of 9 buildings.

In other words, wheat previously produced 9 per turn. It now produces 4.5 per turn if you have only one wheat farm in a town.

If you have two wheat farms in a town, then each gets a 1.13 per turn bonus, making them each produce 5.63 per turn. If you put five wheat farms in a town, then they are all back to producing 9 each per turn, which is the exact equivalent of putting 5 wheat farms in a town in the prior versions of the game.

Beyond that, if you put more wheat farms in the same town, you are getting a bonus compared to prior versions of the game. The maximum amount that you could have produced per turn on a given level 1 wheat farm is 13.5 (bonus of 9 for having 9 wheat farms in that town, on top of the 4.5 baseline). That's a 50% increase over what you would be gaining for those same structures in the old versions of the game.

Bear in mind that, through trade, you can get currency that allows you to upgrade the resource production of buildings by 1.1x for every level beyond the first.

Keeping with our wheat farm example, upgrading a single wheat farm to level 4 will bring it up to producing 10.49 wheat per turn rather than 4.5. This is a bonus of 5.99 wheat per turn JUST ON THAT ONE LEVEL 4 WHEAT FARM, and that bonus is added after the multipliers from town specialization.

So for instance, if you have a town with 9 wheat farms, the production for each level 1 wheat farm would be 13.5 wheat per turn. If one of them was then upgraded to a level 4 wheat farm, that wheat farm would get an added 5.99 wheat per turn added on top of its usual 13.5, for a total of 19.49 wheat per turn.

So, maxed out, if you have 9 level 4 resource producers in a single town, this is an improvement of 216.5% over what the same buildings would have produced in the prior version of the game.

Granted, you've used 27 action points to create these 9 buildings, plus created a bunch of trading posts and bazaars, etc. So you can't just do this on every building all over the place.

These gains actually might be too strict, we'll see. This is one of the chief areas of balance that we're super interested in.

In the tutorial, and on Easy and Normal difficulties, the town specialization logic is not applied at all.

The resource amounts remain what they were on the prior versions of the game, and you get no bonuses for having more of a given type of building in each town.

Fixed an issue where, in the past few versions, bandit counts for total created archery units, total barracks units, etc, were not counting up.

Fixed an issue where, in the past few versions, Dark Elves (and by extension technically other bandit-specific mythological units, although there are none others yet) were not forbidden to pick up tokens and other bonuses.

Thanks to melkathi for reporting.

Fixed an issue in the last couple of versions where resource drops were not appropriately linked to one side, and thus were not actually giving resources to the side that placed them.

Thanks to Billick for reporting.

The maximum health of gods has been increased 8x, and their attack power has been increased 6x.

This makes god-killing actually something really difficult to do even with highly buffed units.

The deaths of bandit units and buildings now contribute to your score, where previously they did not.

This is done for a number of reasons, mainly to avoid confusion and an arbitrary-seeming rule. This also avoids encouraging a particularly defensive playing style above all others.

Older savegames have been updated to include score for prior yellow deaths at the current going rate of whatever your current age is. So in other words, you get off easy with extra points in the ages of monsters and gods compared to the age of man. This is going to make the bandit deaths look way more valuable than the red and blue ones in that savegame, but that's just due to the upgrade and is not a bug.

Thanks to Billick, nas1m, LaughingThesaurus, Mick, and DakaSha for suggesting.

The score gates have been increased by 15% across all of the ages, to account for the roughly 15% extra score (on average, but it will vary heavily) you are likely to get from the fact that bandit units and buildings are now granting you points on their deaths.

Existing savegames have had their scored points increased by 15%, to prevent situations where you automatically lose when opening an old savegame in the new version, etc.

The tooltip for the bandits now properly counts the new barracks, archery, and siege units in its rollup counts.

In the prior version, a fix was put in to not assign mythological and god tokens to a specific faction if they were not actually related to just that faction. So something like Armageddon, which affects everyone equally, or even Midgard Serpent, do not need a faction flag.

Unfortunately, an accidental side effect was to break all sorts of mythological and god token functions for those that actually need to be assigned to a specific faction in order to work.

As part of this fix, existing savegames will update to automatically assign affected tokens to the appropriate matching faction. Or if both factions are (say) Norse, then a Norse token that is in play will go to the red faction, since it can't know which faction actually placed it in that particular case.

Affected tokens include, but were not limited to: Norns, Eldhrimnir, Delos, and Palladium.

Thanks to nas1m and Misery for reporting.

Updated the Delos token to be more clear that it is only talking about making resource costs free, and not also eliminating AP costs.

Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

The unit type of Sarmantian Archers was thrower, when it should have been archer.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Previously, there was some logic that was a bit confusing for even veteran players (who often didn't know about it):

If a unit had previously picked up a bonus directly (as opposed to being granted a bonus through a god power, woe, or from buildings in the town they started in), then they would no longer be able to pick up any more bonus tokens or ransack any more ruins.

This made sense in terms of the ruins, but was confusing with tokens that units would inexplicably just walk past, seeming like a bug or like frustrating AI at best.

The logic has thus been changed so that:

If units already have a specific token's bonus, that they cannot pick up that token. Otherwise they can pick up as many tokens as they come across.

Each unit can only ransack a single ruins tile once, as before.

This new logic will actually change game flow more than a little bit, because it really allows for mega super units with bonuses stacked like crazy. That sort of unit is not typically to your advantage, so that's ok. ;)

Thanks to nas1m, Winge, and Misery for reporting the confusion with this mechanic.

Previously, Mountain Divide and Lake Lure would include bridges and tunnels, which was confusing especially at the start of the game. They no longer do.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Both the keyboard and mouse panning speeds have been increased 50%.

TIP: If you hold Shift, then keyboard panning goes twice as fast.

Now if you hold shift, then mouse panning also goes twice as fast. That was not previously the case.

Thanks to Honknatter for inspiring this change.

There are now two new sliders in the Extras tab of the settings screen, one each for mouse and keyboard panning speeds.

Thanks to Admiral, Castruccio, Winge, and Honknatter for suggesting.

Added a new settings option in the Extras tab (defaults to off): Show Auto-Heal Popups

With this on, little popups happen every time units auto-heal themselves. This tends to flood the screen with floating text, so it's only so useful. Normally you'd just look at their health bars to analyze what happened, but this option exists for those who want it.

Thanks to YoukaiCountry and Mick for suggesting.

The text "Upgrade Human Unit" has now been renamed to "Upgrade Human Or Mythological Unit" since mythologicals have been upgrade-able for a while now.

Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

Fixed an issue with the on-unit bonus text for the Nemean Lion, which referenced immunity to human units rather than bandit units.

Thanks to Winge for reporting.

Official 1.011

(Released June 15, 2013)

Fixed a bug where a variety of mythological tokens were not ending in 1.010.

Thanks to Warpstorm, kai_kratz, and nas1m for reporting.

Fixed a couple of issues with monsters not dying properly in 1.010, and then all sorts of downstream wonkiness from that plus the mythological tokens bug.

The icons on the left sidebar have been completely reworked to pull from Nick Trujillo's comic rather than the icons we had before. These are a lot more visually-descriptive icons in terms of telling you what each page are.

In particular, even we had trouble remembering the direct actions versus god tokens versus mythological tokens from time to time. Just a brief brain blip, but if we were doing that then it's a sure bet that it was confusing for new folks.

The Undo button has been moved directly under the actions count on the left sidebar, so that it's a lot more noticeable when you are looking at how many actions you have left. Some folks were not even finding the undo button, and this should help solve that.

A small button that opens the menu has been added to the left sidebar, directly under the undo button. This has been requested a number of times, and especially should help on windows 8 tablets.

Thanks to Cyborg, windgen, and mrhanman for suggesting.

Updated the unit AI so that if a unit is immune to attacks from a potential target, it gives much higher weight to that target than normal.

Thus units with the nemean lion will really prefer to hit human units rather than running for buildings, etc.

Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

Fixed a typo in the statue of the creator tooltip.

Thanks to Winge for reporting.

Fixed a typo in the Ares tooltip.

Thanks to Mick for reporting.

Fixed a typo in the "Zoom Keyboard In To Cursor" tooltip, along with two other tooltips.

Thanks to solosol for reporting.

Updated the "Entertained" description to properly reference AP instead of movement range. Technically these are the same thing, but it's more confusing to use the other wording.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Fixed a textual inaccuracy that said that Norse Shotputs could not attack units. They can, and were doing so.

Thanks to seiferkatt for reporting.

Fixed a typo in the Thanatos' Gathering tooltip.

Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Updated the description of the Mountain Divide map type to no longer reference having to smite and then place map tiles, and to now include a reference to bandits drilling through mountains.

Thanks to Winge for reporting.

Updated the midgard serpent to destroy half as many land tiles as it previously did, and 1/6th as many building ruins tiles as it previously did, as it was more than a bit overpowered.

It also now gives you a negative score of the same magnitude that it used to give you positive. So not very large, but nontrivial.

Thanks to Billick and LaughingThesaurus for suggesting.

Grassy Ruins (active or inactive) can now be blessed into just a plain old field.

Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

The description of the Sherwood map type now explains what the heck inhabited forests do.

The default map type for new players is now the Plateau Of Circumstance, since that's by far the most popular one.

The distance out from existing land that the "town center can be placed here" display shows has now been doubled from 2 tiles to 4.

This prevents players from needing to build out some land a little bit, and then undo them, to see far enough as to where they can place town centers.

It does cause a noticeable delay when first selecting a town center for placement on very large maps, but this is still just a second or so (depending on your CPU speed) and seems outweighed by the usefulness of being able to see this far at a glance.

Thanks to Misery and Mick for suggesting.

Fixed an error in the tooltip display for the town center requirements, that was saying your town could not be more than 8 tiles away from an enemy town, when in fact the real number is 16.

Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Fixed an issue where the "next" button during playback was not always centering on the next unit properly.

Fixed a screen shake that could happen when two units were on a tile and auto-follow was following one of them attacking.

Fixed an issue where if mythological creatures were extinct and it was the age of gods, then all sorts of craziness would happen.

Specifically: bandits would not properly appear on their keeps; the "look at new unit" view would not go to the keeps; red/blue units would stack on one another inappropriately; red/blue units would attack tiles with "nothing" on them, or attack a building far after it was dead. Also human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

All of those things (well, except that last bit) were caused by the bandits being there in the pre-calculation, and then not there after. Red/blue units were stacking because in one universe the first one died and was no longer there, and then in the parallel universe they both lived because there was no mythological creature there to kill the first one.

Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Bandits are no longer allowed to have mythological units in the age of gods if the extinction event has happened. Previously they were allowed to when you were not, but no longer.

The Paranoia woe no longer causes the towers to pop up around bandit keeps (or yellow towns in general). Just red and blue towns.

Put in a fix that should solve any issues with tokens hanging around after they are supposed to be completely gone.

Randomized Starting Map States!

Except for the tutorial map, which is static as it always has been, all of the other map types are now completely randomized in terms of their starting positions of land, town centers, and so forth.

As has been pointed out, this makes the early part of the game way more interesting and varied. It makes a surprisingly huge difference actually, so it's surprising that nobody (to our recollection) brought this up before today.

Thanks to DakaSha for suggesting!

The Lake Lure map type no longer starts out so small and no longer gives players two town centers to start with.

All New Path To Victory: Armaggeddon!

Added a new direct ability: Armageddon

You cannot place this until the final score requirement has been met (and if you are playing with the score requirements off, then you can't place it at all...).

Armageddon lasts for ten turns, after which point the game ends (in a victory if you still meet all the victory conditions, or else in a loss). During the Armageddon, TWENTY new bandit keeps appear every turn in addition to whatever else would normally be going on! Some of these keeps will even appear within the boundaries of your towns, replacing your buildings (just never replacing your town centers). Only the most prepared will survive!

For extra "fun," you can cause multiple armageddons at once. When the first one's timer runs you, the game will end.

This is another ability that costs the new Soul Imprints resource: a whopping 200, in this case.

The idea here is that if you have already reached a point where you have won the game, you may not wish to just ride out your time until the game ends based on the full turn count running out. If you've gotten things to a point where you are in a dominant position and are just pressing End Turn a bunch, that's BORING. Of course, if you're barely hanging on, it's exciting all the way.

What this addresses is the boring cases. If you're in a dominant position, then use Armageddon to end the game early, but doing so in a way that is exciting and and potentially quite fatal. Either way it's over quickly. ;)

This also balances between those who are playing for high scores versus those who are playing for victories. Some players want to play all the way to the end in order to maximize their scores on the high scoreboards. Others could not care less. Armageddon is potentially a big source of score, but not as much as 30 turns of full combat most likely. So even there there is choice.

It may be that Armageddon is currently too difficult to survive in most cases, but we've been able to survive it reliably with Paranoia hitting two turns into the chaos, and eight intact towns at the start of it all. We'd rather start too hard than too easy, anyhow; so if 200 new bandit keeps turns out to be too much, then we'll see what we can see. ;)

Thanks to boho for suggesting.

Official 1.009

(Released June 12, 2013)

Fixed a bug where level 1 units were granting no points on death, and higher-level units were granting too few points.

Thanks to DakaSha and Mick for reporting.

Fixed a bug where souls were being granted to the killers of units and buildings, not those who had units and buildings die.

Town centers now cost the equivalent in rock that they used to cost in cut stone. This way you don't get completely hosed if you're down to one last town center and unable to place a stone mason so that you can then place more town centers. Aka, when Ultima happens, etc.

Thanks to Billick for inspiring this change.

Updated the marsh tiles in the game to look much nicer, and have four visual variants rather than just repeating the same one over and over.

The filter button on the left side of the screen now does a pop-out like the other buttons on that sidebar do. This makes it easier to manage rather than having to cycle through all the various filters.

Thanks to solosol for suggesting.

Added a new filter mode: Tokens.

This lets you see just the tokens that are on the map, which is quite useful.

The positions of the potter and the Jeweler on the left sidebar have been switched.

Thanks to Echo35 for suggesting.

Made a couple of very minor improvements to the display of unit stats so that things are slightly better spaced and organized.

It is now possible to have lightning-fast games that are only 20 turns per round.

Thanks to boho for suggesting.

The exit game confirmation no longer shows when the current game has already ended.

A new "surrender" option has been added in the main menu. This lets you log a lost game as a loss without having to play to the end, plus gives you the satisfaction of upending the board as if you were mad at the end of a board game. ;)

Thanks to madcow, Castruccio, LaughingThesaurus, Teal_Blue, and nas1m for suggesting.

Fixed an exploitable bug where the woe timers would be decremented by one every time you loaded a savegame.

Thanks to Tripas and Misery for reporting.

Improved the precaching of some tile types so that when the types change for the first time you don't see them blink into nothingness first. For instance a building turning to ruins.

Fixed an issue with both the auto-follow and jump-to-first-unit playback modes where they would not jump to the first unit during the playback mode.

During auto-follow this didn't matter if the unit was moving or attacking, but if a unit was being created (such as a god appearing or a unit coming out of a building), then it would miss that.

For the jump-to-unit mode, it would just miss the whole thing.

This also fixes the issue with the playback pausing when the gods appear, unlike every other kind of playback.

Thanks to SRombauts, Mick, and Winge for reporting.

Added Beacons to the game:

Has no gameplay purpose, but is great for marking locations on the map for other players or for your own later recall. If you place a new beacon on top of an existing beacon, it will instead remove the old beacon.

Did you know? You can hold shift while clicking in order to add or remove a bunch of beacons at once! This actually works with doing any sort of action or tile/unit placement from the left sidebar!

Thanks to TropeSage, yllamana, and Enzyme for suggesting.

The achievements for placing tokens no longer are granted as soon as you place the token down (since the Undo button can make this very exploitable). Now the token achievements are granted when the tokens expire or are picked up or otherwise removed from the game after having been placed.

Thanks to FooBarTheLittle and Winge for reporting.

Two New Land Types

New land type: Mountain Tunnel

Mountains filled with tunnels and bore-holes, which are thus easily passable to all units. It is so fortified that it cannot even be smited away...

New land type: Bridged Lake

A lake with field bridges laid down, making it easily passable to all units. It is so fortified that it cannot even be smited away...

Both the Lake Lure and Mountain Divide maps now have a small chance of seeding in the two new land types as new tiles are added to the landmass.

There's no other direct way for these to show up in game through placement or map seeding; the rest of their appearance is caused by bandit units and so forth.

11 New Unique Human Units For Bandits!

The bandits will no longer directly spawn the faction-specific barracks, archery, or siege units; instead, they use the new bandit-specific units that they now have. All of the human bandit-specific units for the 2.0 version of the game are now in place, the new bandit-specific mythological units are not yet.

Barracks-Style

Drukru

Slow-moving highly-armored heavy hitter that does half-power splash damage to units on the the tiles cardinally adjacent to its target (but not the adjacent buildings). Very dangerous up close, and particularly specializes in taking out enemy mythological units.

Does not emerge until round 2.

Draconaria

Highly armored high-speed cavalry warrior. Attacks are not particularly strong, but she can close distances to targets very quickly. So swift, in fact, that she is immune to counter-attack when she strikes.

Gladius

Midpower swordfighter able to deliver a flurry of blows when in close quarters.

Rogue Paladin

Very highly armor, high-power fighter.

Archery-Style

Triaria

Low-range spear thrower able to loose multiple volleys against a single target once in throwing distance. Specializes in taking out enemy ranged units.

Sagittaria

Powerful, armored longbow-wielding woman.

As a reminder, Hippo-Toxotes were already in the game prior to version 1.0 of the game, and are considered a bandit-specific archery unit.

Siege-Style

Sarmantian Archer

Stealthy, low-health archer with incredible power at low range. Stealth prevents her from being attacked at range.

Field Mechanik

Specializes in constructing heavily-fortified bridges over any lakes she crosses, thus allowing other units to follow her freely. Can only attack buildings, although will damage any units standing on buildings it attacks.

Siege Drill

Specializes in drilling heavily-fortified tunnel networks through mountains, thus allowing other units to follow freely. Also deals heavy damage to buildings it reaches. Can only attack buildings, although will damage any units standing on buildings it attacks.

Saltpetre Cart

Actually contains a few more ingredients than saltpeter, if you look closely. Incredibly powerful explosive can only be used once, but levels an entire tile for sure. Can only attack buildings, although will damage any units standing on buildings it attacks.

Dragon Trebuchet

Does half-power splash damage to the tiles cardinally adjacent to its target. Can only attack buildings, although will damage any units standing on buildings it attacks.

Scoring System Improvements

The unit and building stats now show the "points on death."

Thanks to Jab2565 for suggesting.

The stats on the score tooltip now show the total number of deaths for red, blue, and yellow units and buildings, rather than the total number of kills.

Old data for kills in existing savegames is simply put into the slot for deaths: completely wrong, of course, but this way it doesn't affect score calculations.

The rationale for this change is that it has more to do with entity production and building losses, rather than aggression.

If bandits get into one of your towns and wreck the heck out of it, you actually do get the points for that, whereas before you would not.

If you are fighting an epic losing battle against some overly powerful bandits, you actually get points for your losses, as well. Better than having to scrape out the few points from the minority of kills you make against a stronger foe.

This in turn rewards more use of the human units, since more of them are likely to die as compared to using mythologicals where they are more likely to make kills.

Rather than the score for a unit death being a flat 15 points, this now goes up by the level of the unit in question.

So a level 1 unit is 15 points, level 2 30, level 3 45, level 4 60.

This encourages the use of the higher-level units on upper difficulties, where otherwise high-level units are considered a bit dangerous due to how hard they can be to control.

Thanks to Jab2565 and solosol for suggesting.

Lower turns per round now grant you higher final score multipliers, since those are harder games to hit your score gates with.

This also helps to normalize the longer games a bit, so that the highest possible scores don't always just come from the superlong games.

Thanks to Mick and solosol for suggesting.

In order to keep the score goals from being easily achievable in ages prior to when the next score goal is set, the amount of score required and generated during the ages of monsters and gods have been increased:

The score gate for the age of monsters is now 3x higher, but all of the actions that generate score during the age of monsters also now generate 3x as many points.

The score gate for the age of gods is now 8x higher, but all of the actions that generate score during the age of gods also now generate 8x as many points.

In other words, it is much harder to make much progress on the age of monsters score goal until you are actually in the age of monsters, and the same for the age of gods.

Existing savegames will apply the appropriate multipliers for whatever age you happen to be in.

Military Commandment Fixes

Military commandments now last for six turns rather than three, or until the god dies or moves away.

Military commandments now take 0 action points to place, rather than one.

Fixed a regression where once again military commandments were not working properly (so you couldn't order your guys to kill a god).

Thanks to RadioZone and Ipkins for reporting.

Fixed an issue where gods were not properly counterattacking units that attacked them.

Limited Siege Unit Stacking

A limited amount of unit stacking is now allowed in the game:

A single allied siege unit and non-siege unit can now share the same tile. Enemy units still cannot share at all, and any other permutations of allied units cannot share.

If a tile is attacked, all the units on that tile will take damage.

The chief benefit of this, however, is that it allows for non-ranged siege units to make their way through heavier armies that are in their way, thus reaching their targets.

For instance, this greatly increases the power and utility of trojan horses.

Thanks to Misery and Zeyurn for inspiring this change.

When two units are stacked on a single tile, they now spread out horizontally in a nice fashion.

Unit Leveling-Related Improvements

The level and the "star for if it has a bonus applied" now show up visually above the heads of each unit.

The star was previously shown larger and next to the faction flag behind the unit. But this was harder to see, and looked a little funky, and made the faction flag harder to see sometimes.

The level of units was never previously shown except in tooltips, and really this is pretty darn critical information if you are considering the flow of an upcoming battle.

Most likely the obscurity of this information was making new players not really do upgrades as much as they previously would have otherwise done.

The mythological creatures directly placed by players are no longer automatically granted upgrades to higher levels in the age of monsters and the age of man.

Previously they would be level 2 in the age of man, and level 3 in the age of gods. This was just too overpowered compared to their human counterparts, and was messing with the resource usage in a negative way (ie, requiring too few).

You can obviously still upgrade these at any time, manually, but now you have to pay for the upgrades to the respective levels rather than getting them for free.

One reason we previously had the mythological creatures automatically upgrade was the confusion that new players would have as to why their mythologicals were getting trashed by enemy ones in the later ages. Now with the levels directly showing, this is no longer a point of confusion.

Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting this rather strenuously. ;)

The "upgrade unit" action now costs 0 AP. This makes it a lot easier to use, which is important for a few reasons.

Late in the game, you often wind up having way more resources than you might need, but not any more AP than you did before. This helps to balance that out.

Now that mythological creatures are not auto-upgraded in the later ages, you'll be manually upgrading them a lot more, and the extra AP cost would just be too extreme for them.

Side note: this does NOT devalue the schools too much. Doing an upgrade manually costs you 100% more resources for each level you go up. Schools produce higher-leveled units for free.

The upgrade unit tooltip when hovering over a unit is now more informative, showing you at a glance the resources you have on hand for each resource required for upgrading that unit. Waaaay easier to make decisions that way.

The upgrade unit text has been updated with the following addition:

Did you know? You can hold shift while clicking in order to upgrade multiple units, or to repeatedly upgrade a single unit. This actually works with doing any sort of action or tile/unit placement from the left sidebar!

Thanks to Pepisolo for inspiring this change.

New Soul Imprints Resource

Added a new Soul Imprint resource.

Residue from the soul of a human departing from this mortal coil. Allows certain powerful abilities to be invoked by The Creator.

Every time a human unit or building dies, a soul is added to their factions stores.

Bless Tile

Various types of tiles cannot be smited by force, but can be blessed into a more pleasing form. Building Ruins in towns that are still alive, Obsidian, Bridged Lakes, and Mountain Tunnels can all be blessed into forms that you can then work with further.

Costs 20 human soul imprints.

Strategically, this is super useful because:

It allows you some way to counter the new bandit drills and mechaniks and so forth. You aren't just stranded with completely unusable tiles forever; but getting rid of those things comes at a nontrivial cost, so you have to weigh that, which is good.

It allows you to repair slightly-damaged towns so that there are not ugly forever-there blots on them. This gives you a better chance to maintain the towns you already have, although it just turns the ruins into fields, so you still have to do the rebuilding after this. It's not something you can do infinitely, which is good, but it does let you make spot repairs and correct for relatively minor things. The loss of a whole town is still irreversible, however, which is particularly good.

Convert Enemy Unit

Cause an enemy unit to have a change of heart and join your faction.

Costs 50 human soul imprints.

Strategically, this is really interesting because it provides a new (albeit expensive) way to deal with threats from overpowered enemies aside from using mythological creatures. This is huge!

If you have an enemy unit that is overpowered from some buff and running rampant... well, if there are enough souls on the losing faction's side, then that can be used to turn the over-strong unit right back around and send them at the other faction.

If there are a bunch of bandits coming from a keep, you can convert a couple of them to avoid getting overwhelmed.

This may be too powerful, we'll see; if so, then it's a matter of adjusting its cost. But right now this is so expensive that you really can't do it often, so it's more of an augmentation than anything else.

Put in some safety-syncing code to make sure that if players somehow get out of sync, it never lasts for more than one turn. Specifically, it now does this safety-sync right before it goes to the after-turn playback phase, so if there are any differences that would cause errors in playback, it fixes those on the clients to match the server.

Ideally there are no desyncs anyhow, but this at least mitigates their effect to almost nil.

The game now properly lets multiplayer clients see which players they are waiting on when they have finished their turns and are hanging out.

Thanks to Munsta for reporting.

When other players have finished their turn and are now waiting on you, or have finished playback and are now waiting on you, a message now shows to that effect so that you know to get a move on.

Thanks to yllamana for suggesting.

Bandits are no longer allowed to pick up the Nemean Lion token, since it's useless to them.

Thanks to nas1m, Winge, and FooBarTheLittle for reporting.

Buildings that do not unlock until a certain round were previously unavailable in sandbox mode. Fixed.

Thanks to Pepisolo for reporting.

Fixed a bug with the midgard serpent and a few other similar global-effect tokens where they could remove tiles after units had already precalculated that they would move there, thus leading to units leaping over holes and doing other really strange stuff like stacking up on top of one another, etc.

This also was affecting the labyrinth and Yggdrasil in terms of causing unit stacking.

Thanks to Mick, Bluddy, Misery, and matobinder for reporting.

The tooltips for the resources on the sidebar now show the count of buildings for that faction that are involved in the production chain of that resource (just one building for raw resources, several for finished goods). Sunstone does not include moonstone production, as it's a raw resource.

Thanks to FooBarTheLittle, zespri, and yllamana for suggesting.

In the left sidebar, when you are placing buildings, it now shows a count of how many of those buildings that faction already has on the map.

As an added bonus, when placing lands it also shows how many lands of each type are on the map.

Also also, this now shows the counts of directly-placeable units and tokens that are currently out on the map for that faction.

Thanks to James Allen, FooBarTheLittle, zespri, and yllamana for suggesting.

Fixed an issue specific to the Lake Lure map where the starting towns were too close together and thus all sorts of wonky issues could happen.

Thanks to onyhow and Misery for reporting.

When you can't play a token from the sidebar because of it being on cooldown, it now shows as grayed out.

When you use the undo button while having a sidebar submenu extended, the sidebar submenu status now updates.

Thanks to FooBarTheLittle for reporting.

When your cursor is outside the game window, it no longer shows tooltips for things you are hovering over outside the game window. MAN was that annoying in windowed mode.

A couple of the finished goods producers have been moved around in the left sidebar to make them easier to find relative to their raw resource counterparts.

The right-hand sidebar has been revamped so that its data is more compact horizontally, and thus can support two rows. Now you can thus see all your raw resources in one column (to the left), and all your finished goods in another column (to the right).

This solves a lot of requests of players without actually increasing the side of that sidebar much at all (less than 10 pixels wide) and without reducing the size of the font (though it is now overlaid over the images).

The sword, pike, warhammer, and battle axe finished goods have all just been condensed down into a single "melee weapon" finished good. Also, the Bow finished good has been renamed to "ranged weapon."

This keeps from there being a fiddly number of weapons specific to individual units, which didn't add much except extra things to look at and take up space that could be better used for other things. Shifting these all to one finished good hardly even affects balance, interestingly.

In the tooltip for finished goods on the right-hand sidebar, it now says "on demand: X amount of the finished good from Y amount of the other resources needed to convert into that."

Hopefully this will help to stop the confusion from people who think that they already have X amount of cut stone and Y amount of rock, and that they could get more cut stone if only the rock would be converted over.

Whenever you view Nick's comic, it now plays the track "Running In The Sun" rather than whatever else happened to be playing in the background at the time (likely the title music).

This is a lot more appropriate of a tone for the comic, as one reviewer pointed out.

The maximum resolution of the game has been increased to support the 7680x1600 EyeFinity resolution.

Thanks to Mikuki for suggesting.

Previously, resource costs were improperly refunded during the setup phase, letting you gain tons of resources just by placing and undoing.

Thanks to vince0018 and FooBarTheLittle for reporting.

Fixed a huge bug that was causing MP desyncs as well as causing some melee units to act insanely during solo play—but ONLY when you didn't skip to the end of combat, but instead watched it all the way through. The speed of playback could also mess with this.

Thanks to matobinder, Munsta, and Crimdal for reporting.

Fixed an issue where the "What's New" link directed to the wrong wiki page.

Thanks to seiferkatt for reporting.

"What's New" on the main menu has been replaced with a more clear "Recent Patch Notes" name, so that more players will know what that is.

The range-of-one siege units now all have the mountainwalk ability, letting them no longer get bogged down in the same lines of travel with the main human entities.

All of the ranged siege units are useful enough as it is, and can just keep moving with the crowd. But the range-of-one guys were a bit hard to use depending on the terrain.

If you still want to block them, of course you can use lakes; that just won't protect you from the ranged siege units, so you'd have to do double duty with mountains and lakes to make perfect protection.

Mountains and lakes now cost 2AP to place, rather than one; this makes their use something to consider more—as with smiting—but still not something that is impossible to do.

Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

Minotaurs and Trolls now only damage units on the cardinally-adjacent tiles to their target, not buildings as well. This makes it so that they aren't leveling towns in one or two blows.

Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

Military commandments were accidentally broken right prior to the release of the game, but have now been fixed. Sorry about that!

Mountains and lakes can now be placed on any difficulty level (having them on lower difficulty levels but not higher ones was a bit disorienting; and not having them on lower difficulty levels anymore has been massively unpopular).

The bandit keeps are no longer immune to mythological creatures, and have had their health returned to 30k instead of 15k like they were recently reduced to. Again, these changes were hugely unpopular with players, so they're gone. You know we listen!

The walls of bandit keeps have been upgraded with magical safeguards that prevent them from taking any damage from mythological creatures!

However, also reduced the health of bandit keeps from 30,000 to 15,000.

Bear in mind that the keeps are meant to be something you have to have siege units to deal with; that was their original intent, and not only were players circumventing that with mythologicals, in at least one case there was extreme cheese possible with the mythologicals.

Thanks to Levi and Mick for inspiring this change.

Fixed the issue with the town names being different for each player in multiplayer.

Thanks to Zeyurn for reporting.

Fixed a definite desync with norse mortars attacking and having a different amount of chance for themselves to die on each machine.

This was still something quite sporadic, but definitely could cause issues.

Fixed an issue with the Undo feature where it would trigger Eldhrimnir, Odin, (theoretically) Tartarus Rising, and similar.

Thanks to brammel for reporting.

Minotaurs and Chimera have lost their target bonuses against both buildings and heavy infantry.

The frost giant bonus against gods has been converted to instead being a bonus against enemy mythologicals.

The light elf bonus against gods and light siege have also been converted to a bonus against enemy mythologicals.

The Valkyrie have had their base attack power dropped in general, but now get a massive bonus against enemy mythologicals.

Official 1.003

(Released May 26, 2013)

Fixed a rather embarrassing issue where a testing flag got left on and no more than two players were allowed to connect to a game, instead of 8. Sorry about that!

Thanks to Spud_02 for reporting.

Previously, mountains and lakes were only place-able on medium difficulty and down, because they were known to be exploit-y but some people really like doing designs with them, etc. This was prior to the addition of sandbox mode, though, that we last evaluated this; so now we've made this sandbox-mode only.

Does this make the easier versions of the game harder? Yeah... you can't just plop down a mountain when the going gets rough. But really this seems pretty much in line with the game, you know?